Professional researcher or a good guest? Ethical dilemmas involved in researching children and families in the home setting

In this article we explore our experiences of researching children and families in the home setting. We trace the impact of the home setting on some ethical and methodological issues which arose in the course of conducting our field work and consider issues of consent, confidentiality, power, leaving the field and specifically our dilemmas, both personal and professional, around researcher identity. We suggest that our dilemmas can be encapsulated as a struggle between the conflicting requirements of the professional researcher and the ‘good guest’. Drawing upon our interviews with over 100 children and families in the Home School Knowledge Exchange (HSKE) project, we pose questions about the relationship between the researcher and the families. In reflecting on our own experiences we draw on the work of other social researchers and in addition we consider the function and efficacy of professional codes of practice to prepare and protect researchers and respondents in the field.