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Ethical Dilemmas in Historical Research with People with Learning Difficulties
Author(s) -
Rolph S.
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
british journal of learning disabilities
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.633
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1468-3156
pISSN - 1354-4187
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-3156.1998.tb00069.x
Subject(s) - subject (documents) , learning disability , oral history , sociology , psychology , developmental psychology , anthropology , computer science , library science
This paper discusses the ethics of historical research with people with learning difficulties, and in particular those issues which arise in both oral and archival history. Pioneers in the work of collecting the life stories of people with learning difficulties debated some of the issues around biographical and autobiographical methods (Bogdan & Taylor, 1982). The history of learning disability has, however, until comparatively recently been a neglected subject. The histories that have existed have been written predominantly from an official viewpoint, have not included the views of people with learning difficulties themselves, and have tended therefore to be partial accounts (Kanner, 1964). A new development of the 1980s and 90s, however, has been the growing interest by people with learning difficulties in reclaiming their histories (Cooper, 1997; Barron, 1996; Lewis, 1997). Historians who have been supporting them have suddenly been faced with new ethical dilemmas which are only just beginning to be discussed in the literature (Potts & Fido, 1991; Atkinson et al. , 1997; Rolph, 1998). In the following sections, I will highlight some of the issues which occur in this new historical research, and which particularly concerned me in my own research. I then discuss the methods adopted in an attempt to solve them.