Choosing not to help: The ethical challenge of beneficence for clinicians conducting ethnographic research

Abstract

For clinicians conducting ethnographic research, conflict can arise between the clinical understanding of beneficence, meaning to apply skills and knowledge for people towards whom there is a duty of care, and enacting beneficence through research, which can sometimes allow researchers to withhold assistance in the interests of generating data which may have a broader beneficent effect when applied. As a nurse and ethnographic researcher, I present three reflections on my own fieldwork with people engaging in recovery from harmful methamphetamine use, to explore how beneficence can be enacted in constrained and complex circumstances. These reflections provide the basis for a discussion of how relational ethics can reveal the fabric of microethical actions and decisions which comprise clinical and research interactions, allowing practitioners to demonstrate a continuity between how they enact principles like beneficence both in the context of clinical work and in the field.