Svetlana Erpyleva, Public Sociology Laboratory
How do you conduct ethical research on sensitive topics in an authoritarian state when informed consent becomes difficult to obtain? Sociologist Svetlana Erpyleva from PS LAB describes how her team had to find its own path between ethical responsibility, growing distrust, and the constraints of semi-covert fieldwork.
When informed consent becomes problematic
When my colleagues and I began our research on Russians’ perceptions of the Russo-Ukrainian war in late winter 2022, we had little idea of the future scale of this particular and related projects, or of the many difficulties we would eventually face. The project began as a series of classic sociological in-depth interviews, conducted mostly online and always audio-recorded. Within a few years, however, it evolved into a set of interrelated projects examining various aspects of Russian wartime society, many of them conducted inside Russia and largely based on ethnographic fieldwork. In addition to the various risks that such work entails, we also encountered a significant methodological and ethical challenge—namely, the problem of informed consent.
At the beginning, this did not seem to pose a problem at all. Although some of our potential interviewees refused to participate in research, those who agreed always knew what they were consenting to. Indeed, one cannot take part in an interview without being aware of it, and there was little reason for us to conceal our identity or research goals. We had no funding, no commissioning body, and no agenda beyond trying to make sense of what was happening in the minds of our fellow citizens after Russia invaded Ukraine. We were fully transparent with our interlocutors.
Within a few years, however, the situation changed radically. First, with people gradually realising that they live in a more repressive context, and the grow of general fatigue from “politics” in general and the war in particular, fewer and fewer people were willing to answer researchers’ questions about politically sensitive issues—especially when interviews were audio-recorded. As a result, we increasingly relied on ethnography as our primary method of data collection. During ethnographic fieldwork, we observed conversations among others on topics relevant to our research and, moreover, actively engaged in informal conversations ourselves, asking people about their experiences of living through wartime. Precisely because these were informal conversations—that is, because people did not know that they were participating in research at that very moment—they were often willing to speak openly. These conversations were not audio-recorded; instead, they were reconstructed by our field researchers in their field diaries. Yet many interlocutors, while willingly and sometimes even enthusiastically engaging in such discussions, did not explicitly consent to having their words used as research data.
Second, over the past few years, attitudes toward the “West”—and toward “Western researchers” in particular—have shifted within Russian society. Fewer and fewer people are willing to speak to researchers perceived as “Western,” either because of potential risks to them and their families, or because of a sincere belief that doing so might harm their country. Although Public Sociology Laboratory is an independent research collective not affiliated with any Western (or Russian) institution, and although all its members are Russian citizens—some of whom continue to reside in Russia—many of us live and work in Western countries. Moreover, in 2024, the group was designated a “foreign agent” by the Russian Ministry of Justice. Consequently, even when our field researchers disclosed their research identity during ethnographic fieldwork, they often had to downplay the “Western” dimension of our work. As a result, the consent we obtained in such situations was, at times, only partially informed.
Thus, we had to collect part of our data without participants’ informed consent. The alternative would have been not to collect any data at all. We chose to proceed with data collection, while ensuring full anonymity for research participants and minimising any potential harm to them. But was this an ethically sound decision? Here, turning to academic discussions of informed consent in ethnographic research may help.
Informed consent discussed by ethnographers
Indeed, we are not the first ethnographers to struggle with the problem of informed consent—this issue has been widely discussed within the professional community. Some scholars advocate for the necessity of informed consent under all circumstances. Others justify deception when overt research is not possible and when the study produces clear social benefits. They argue that the benefits produced may justify the means used, provided, of course, that no harm is done to participants (Chadwick et al. 1984; Lauder 2003). A third group argues that the concept of “informed consent,” borrowed from medicine, is fundamentally incompatible with ethnographic fieldwork as such (Bell 2014). For example, Kirsten Bell (2014, p. 516) writes: “Informed consent, as originally conceptualised, is about agreeing to be ‘done to’ in the context of data collection itself. The key issue is that in ethnographic research—in any of its disciplinary formulations—for the most part, the ‘doing to’ doesn’t happen in the fieldwork situation but, rather, in the act of writing about it.” According to Bell, the “informed consent” paradigm assumes a researcher who is a (male) invader of the private sphere of passive and fragile research subjects—an assumption that is itself problematic. At the same time, Bell emphasises that being critical of informed consent does not mean endorsing deception or covert research, and certainly does not mean rejecting ethical responsibility.
An even larger body of scholars argues that, in practice, ethnographers rarely adhere strictly to either full transparency or complete concealment. Instead, they rely on a range of “intermediate” approaches to consent: presenting partial truths, assuming contextually appropriate roles in the field, withholding certain information rather than engaging in outright deception, securing oral consent from some participants, and similar strategies (Thorne 1980; Bulmer 1982; Roulet et al. 2017; Sydiq 2022). The challenges become even more pronounced when conducting ethnographic research on politically sensitive issues in authoritarian contexts, where full disclosure by the researcher may put participants at risk (Sydiq 2022). In this sense, the “semi-covert” character of ethnographic research did not mean for us an abandonment of ethical principles; rather, it entailed an ongoing, situational engagement with ethical dilemmas in each field encounter.
Our approach
This was precisely the approach we adopted. We did not reject the idea of consent altogether, nor did we ever allow ourselves to use deception. Our field researchers, like many ethnographers before them—not only those working in wartime or in authoritarian regimes—relied on various intermediary strategies for dealing with consent.
First, they often adopted “appropriate semi-covert roles” (Bulmer 1982). For example, they assumed roles accessible to any outsider that naturally involved informal interaction with local residents—such as volunteers assisting internally displaced persons in a regional centre, or solitary visitors in cafés or bars engaging in casual conversations with baristas or bartenders.
Second, whenever appropriate, they informed their interlocutors that they were researchers interested in the situation in a particular region or city. The main principle we followed, drawing on Sydiq (2022), was this: the more sustained the interaction or the greater the assistance received from a participant, the more transparent researchers were about their research goals. For example, when overhearing a brief conversation on a bus about the war, researchers would later recount it in their field diaries without informing those involved. However, when volunteering alongside someone daily for a week, discussing their wartime experiences, and recording reflections in a diary afterward, researchers would disclose that they were conducting research on how residents were living in wartime Russia. When relying on someone as a gatekeeper—that is, when a person helped the researcher establish new contacts and access additional participants—researchers were fully transparent and obtained explicit informed consent.
Finally, we ensured that no harm was done to participants by fully anonymising all recorded material and refraining from collecting any identifying personal data.
This approach can, of course, still be criticised for not ensuring fully informed consent in every instance of data collection. Yet, from this perspective, the entire practice of ethnographic research could be subject to similar criticism. Ultimately, at a certain point, we—as researchers, like many of our ethnographer colleagues—are confronted with a difficult question: should research continue despite various risks and the impossibility of adhering to the ideal model of practice outlined in Western research guidelines, or should we refrain from conducting such research altogether? We have chosen the former.
Conclusion
Thus, conducting ethnographic research on war perception and experience in wartime authoritarian Russia confronted us with a number of challenges, among them the inability to obtain fully informed consent from all of our interlocutors. Although this problem may appear unique and even “unsolvable” from the perspective of Russian or area studies—which typically rely on quantitative or structured qualitative data (e.g., audio-recorded interviews)—it is far from unique within ethnographic sociology and anthropology.
There is no consensus among ethnographers as to which approach to informed consent best serves the discipline. Many scholars, in one way or another, emphasise that ethnographers almost always rely on various intermediate strategies to secure participants’ consent. Drawing on these discussions and practices, we developed our own approach to informed consent—one that places participants’ safety at its centre, rejects deception, allows for the use of field-appropriate semi-covert roles, and requires that researchers disclose their research identity to the extent corresponding to the degree of assistance provided by the interlocutor. In other words, we sought to match the level of openness shown to us with an equivalent level of openness on our part.
About the author
Svetlana Erpyleva is a sociologist and a researcher with the Public Sociology Laboratory. She received her PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki. Her past and present research focuses on collective action, political socialisation, youth and children’s political participation, war perception in Russia, and various aspects of Russia’s wartime society.
Reading recommendations
Bell, M., and K. Quek. 2018. Authoritarian Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace. International Organization 72:227–242.
Bulmer, M. 1982. When is disguise justified? Alternatives to covert participant observation. Qualitative Sociology 5: 251–264.
Chadwick, B. A., Bahr, H. M. & Albrecht, S. L. 1984. Social Science Research Methods. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Lauder, M.A. 2003. Covert Participant Observation of a Deviant Community: Justifying the Use of Deception, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 18:2, 185-196.
Roulet, T.J, Gill, M.J, Stenger, S, and Gill, D.J. 2017. Reconsidering the Value of Covert Research: The Role of Ambiguous Consent in Participant Observation. Organizational Research Methods 20.3: 487-517.
Sydiq, T. 2022. Autoritäre Interessenaushandlung. Wie Iraner*innen Politik innerhalb autoritärer Rahmenbedingungen gestalten. Springer VS.
Thorne, B. (1980) “You Still Takin’ Notes?” Fieldwork and Problems of Informed Consent. Social Problems 27.3: 284–297.