The ethical framework of research practice

This chapter focus on ethical research practices in educational leadership by considering how value driven research processes reflect and articulate with some of the key dynamic vectors of educational organisations - power, culture, decision-making, construction of identity, learning communities, policy contexts. It discusses how an explicitly ethical framework of research practice helps research projects, whether face-to face or online, to construct collaborative cultures. These contribute to a project’s success in gaining trustworthy knowledge to benefit a range of communities by gaining and maintaining participants’ informed consent through protecting participants’ and their institutions’ from harm by preserving their anonymity and privacy as well as the secure curation and publication of data. This approach is also applied to particularly problematic areas of research such as insider or practitioner research.