I don't feel so fluffy now

I've been thinking again this week about the ethics of ethnographic research. Not so much the NHS version of ethics, which usually runs along the lines of: 'if you are planning on injecting your participants with some little-researched substance, make sure you've got their signature first' or 'our 36 page ethics review form which will probably eat away six months of your life is only there to ensure the safety of patients'. (Cynical? Moi?)

No, I'm more concerned about the subtle ways in which the seemingly harmless process of collecting people's stories can become a sensitive, problematic and sometimes frought experience.

I'm not sure I could explain what I'm trying to say any better than Alison Bechdel already has. Alison is the author of 'Fun Home', a graphic-memoir of her childhood growing up in a house full of secrets and denial. It's an astounding book. But aside from the story, what is gripping about this book is that it illustrates how 'truth' is a shaky concept. In the book, Alison writes her version of the truth, a version which is different to that of others in the story. There is no 'real' story about what happened, just interpretation: was her father's death suicide or a tragic accident? Who knows. But it also doesn't really matter. Alison believes it was suicide, and so suicide it becomes.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2006, Alison reflected on what happens when you write your own truth, and when that truth is different from the truth of other characters in your story:

"I've discovered that there's something inherently hostile about having someone else write about your life, no matter how well-intentioned that other person might be," Bechdel says. "It violates their subjectivity. That's the really awful thing about this book: I made my mother and my brothers objects in my version of this story."

That's ethnography. I am making people objects in my story. I can't get round the fact that I am writing about the midwives' lives and whatever I interpret as the 'truth' simply becomes the truth, for the purpose of the thesis at the very least. I listen, I watch, I respect what they have to say about their world but in the end I'm the one who does the writing.

I remember being paralysed by the analysis of my masters interviews. What if I got it wrong? What if I misinterpreted their stories? What if they just didn't like what I said? What if they felt betrayed? It was only when I concluded that there probably wasn't anything I could do about it that I could actually begin to write the story I wanted to write. And so the ethics became even more dodgy. How come I get to decide how the story goes?

So I'm back in that place and having to come to the same conclusion as last time. The only problem that this time I've got to know these people so well. They've pretty much become my friends; now I'm worried I'm about to slowly violate their subjectivity and there wasn't anything about that on the NHS Ethics Committee form...