Tuesday, February 5

Purpose of this Site

Heidi, Raychelle and Donna believe strongly about making research ethics in the Deaf-World a community-based development. We shouldn't be the ones making decisions about what is right or wrong, and what is acceptable and what is not, in research. We believe that the Sign Language communities should decide what is best. In this blog, we hope to get feedback and suggestions through your comments on this site on what to change, add and remove from our proposed research ethics for the Sign Language communities.

Our aim is also to make this a bilingual and accessible site to the ASL/Deaf community. An ASL translation of our paper will be posted soon.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just read your article in SLS. Nicely written.
It seems to me that the most salient fields that this discussion applies to is those who conduct research in psychology, education, and other similar fields. Cultural understanding is critical for providing a good interpretion of why deaf people would score differently on a psychological evaluation. I think it's harder for some researchers to understand how this discussion of requisite cultural knowledge by the researcher & participation of the community still applies to some research efforts devoid of overt cultural analysis (e.g. analysis of morphological structure of aspect in ASL and its relation to general linguistic theory yadda yadda.) I've read papers that made strong arguments about the structure of ASL, but in my opinion they were derived from bad data. The researcher did not know ASL and did not know really what kind of data they were looking at. Having community members involved in the project would have avoided the erroneous interpretations made in these papers.
My point is just that I agree with your line of thinking and your argument definitely applies to linguistics.

raychelle said...

Clifton,

Exactly! Sign language and the culture of sign language communities are bound and researchers who want to foray into our communities need to work with people are members of our communities, from the beginning of the project to the very end, to produce ethically sound and valid research results... regardless of their field, their research question, etc.-

How we can make this happen is another question-

and thank you for your compliment!

Raychelle

Amy said...

Hi Raychelle, Donna and Heidi,

I am so thrilled that you created this blog addressing this very important issue!

Thank you so much for making this leap!

Amy Cohen Efron