1st Edition
Engaging Research Communities in Writing Studies Ethics, Public Policy, and Research Design
This book invites readers to reconsider how writing studies researchers work with Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) on behalf of their communities and argues that engaging with IRBs during the research design process helps practitioners conduct research more quickly and effectively.
Using empirical data from both writing studies and extra-disciplinary contexts, Dr. Johanna Phelps presents findings from two discipline-wide studies, as well as metadata from two IRBs, to develop a principled engagement framework for writing studies researchers to interact with their communities. Phelps further examines the many facets of conducting research with human participants—from comprehending federal policy updates to pondering specific ethical issues to developing detailed research designs—and explores the confluence of ethics, policy, and methodology in a thoroughgoing philosophical investigation of writing studies as a public good.
This engaging and timely exploration of research design will be an important resource for scholars and students of writing studies; rhetoric and composition; technical and professional communication; cultural rhetoric; literacy studies; research design; research methodologies; research ethics; IRBs; justice; and critical theory.
Chapter 4 and Interchapter 4 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003082002-9 under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Chapter 6 and Interchapter 6 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003082002-13 under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Introduction
First Interchapter: Defining and Historicizing Research with Human Participants
Chapter One: Situating Justice in the Research Enterprise
Second Interchapter: Surveys as a Data Collection Method in Writing Studies
Chapter Two: Metadata: What We Know About Research with Human Participants
Third Interchapter: "Medium" Data, Interviewing, and Corpus Analysis
Chapter Three: All "Spun Up": Findings from Familiar and Unfamiliar Methods
Fourth Interchapter: Collecting and Working with Census Data
Chapter Four: Don’t be too WEIRD: Research for the Future of Writing Studies
Fifth Interchapter: Revisions to the Common Rule
Chapter Five: Ethical Praxis at Sites of Writing Studies Research
Sixth Interchapter: Questions to Consider when Designing Justice-Driven Research
Chapter Six: Centering Practical Ethics in Writing Studies Research
Biography
Johanna L. Phelps, PhD, MPA, is an Assistant Professor of English at Washington State University Vancouver. Her research on public policy’s impact on writing studies has appeared in venues such as IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication and Present Tense. Her scholarship on paradigms, programmatic research, and community engagement has been published with Technical Communication Quarterly and Reflections.
