Cautionary comments on an ethnographic tale gone wrong.
Greg Scott's paper, "'They got their program, and I got mine": a cautionary tale concerning the ethical implications of using respondent-driven sampling to study injection drug users' (Scott, 2008) is seriously flawed by (1) a near complete lack of context in assessing ethical implications of respondent-driven sampling, (2) ignoring the ethnographer's impact on what is observed, (3) a seemingly bedrock belief that the intimacy of ethnographic interviews produces truth, and (4) a misreading of power relationships. Some scenarios depicted in the paper appear inauthentic and the consistency of reported hustles strains credibility. The paper fails further by not situating respondent-driven sampling within the broader array of word-of-mouth recruiting methods and by ignoring advantages RDS may confer both in improving the quality of data and in anticipating the possibility of coercive recruiting.
Ouellet
Lawrence J
LJ
University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. ljo@uic.edu
D000884:Anthropology, Cultural; D015982:Bias; D003625:Data Collection / Q000941:ethics / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D018579:Patient Selection / Q000941:ethics*; D012494:Sampling Studies; D015819:Substance Abuse, Intravenous / Q000208:ethnology