Doing ageing research in COVID-19 pandemic times and insights from reflexive ethics
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The measures applied worldwide to tame the COVID-19 pandemic impacted empirical social scientific ageing research. Social distancing rules, aims to protect the vulnerable via isolation, but also the resistance of many older people to be vulnerabilised played a role in how social science research based on unmediated contact between people was organized in 2020 and beyond. In our view, the pandemic situation brought a fragmentation, fluidity, ambiguity and a high level of uncertainty to the research planning and process. This paper introduces our experience with doing qualitative research with older adults. It reflects how the research was discussed, re-designed, and practised within two international research teams working in the European context. We use the perspective of reflexive ethics to identify and interpret ‘ethically important moments’ in the research process and to consider/ponder over the question on how and under what conditions can we carry on with empirical research without putting our participants and ourselves at risk. |
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