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Auto/biographical narrative research that touches on 'sensitive' areas can elicit accounts that researchers may find distressing and threatening to their emotional and psychological health. In this paper we offer a 'confessional tale' through which we consider our experiences of investigating a sensitive and painful topic from the perspectives of the Principal Investigator who was intimately acquainted with the field of study because it affected her own family, and of the Research Associate who had no prior experience of the substantive area. We discuss how we dealt with our distress and pain and offer some novel suggestions that other educational researchers using qualitative approaches might adopt to help ensure that their research is ethical in that the wellbeing of researchers, as well as participants, is safeguarded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented which the editors discuss an article regarding the narrative approach to ethical research by Julie White and Tanya Fitzgerald, an analysis on the ethical issues in a project funded by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) by Renée DePalma, and a discussion on the exercise of academic freedom.

This paper raises some questions about academic authorial honesty under the headings of Plagiarism (including self-plagiarism), Theft, and Collusion. Compared with the medical sciences, the social sciences in general and education specifically, lag behind in terms of critical attention being paid to the problem of plagiarism, the peer review process and academic authorial ethics. The ubiquity of the Internet, the ever intensifying demand to publish or perish, and maybe, a general shift in perceptions of what constitutes 'bad' plagiarism and collusion which challenge traditional notions of what constitutes authorial honesty, mean that the time may be ripe for a consideration by academic writers and journal editors of how they regard and deal with the whole area. This paper makes an early contribution to the discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers some of the decisions that researchers take and raises issues around researcher reflexivity, identity, values and ethics. It focuses attention on researchers and reflects on how the research they do, the topics they investigate, the methodologies they espouse, the methods they use and the writing/reporting styles they adopt, can have implications both in terms of their career development and with regard to their personal integrity and moral positioning. It is something of a truism to state that the sorts of research that get done depend upon the decisions researchers make. However, the relationship between research completed and in the public domain and individual researchers' choices is by no means a simple or straightforward one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]