The Ethical Dilemmas of Restudies in Researching Youth

Abstract

Since 2000, we have been undertaking a restudy of Elias’s ‘Adjustment of Young Workers to Work Situations and Adult Roles’ project (1962–64). We experienced a number of ethical dilemmas/questions in undertaking the restudy and in this article, we outline these and discuss how we resolved them as the project developed. In doing so, we focus our discussion around three central questions: ( i) how did we reuse this data and balance the conflict between having access to personal biographical information with the wish to trace and reinterview the original respondents?; ( ii) how do we responsibly analyze data that was collected but never used whilst providing an authentic voice for these ‘past’ young workers?; and ( iii) how do we accurately represent the demise of the research project and the contribution of the researchers originally involved? We conclude by considering the ethical imperative of the greater reuse of existing data on young people.