Navigating Ethical Dilemmas: The Value Landscape Behind Fieldwork Decisions

Fieldwork provides essential access to participants’ everyday practices, but this close engagement also exposes researchers to unpredictable ethical dilemmas. Navigating these dilemmas can be challenging for researchers because ethics principles, codes of conduct, or assessment by ethics boards do not address all fieldwork challenges that researchers might encounter. Addressing ethical dilemmas inevitably involves researchers’ own values and judgements, yet, little is known about what and how researchers’ values inform their decisions in practice. This study investigates researchers’ value enactment, drawing on four workshops with 21 participants who conduct user research fieldwork. We identified (1) a collection of values that orient researchers’ practice, extending current understandings of what values operate in design research; and (2) a set of seven questions, each anchored in a declared value that surface recurring tensions in fieldwork. Together, these insights deepen the understanding of ethical decision-making in fieldwork, supporting ethical reflection and value alignment within teams.