Vulnerability in procedural ethics: A study of 44 national research ethics guidelines

How should qualitative social scientists understand and engage with the concept of vulnerability in their research? Scholars have largely approached this question from the perspective of ethics in practice, inductively exploring the real-world challenges that arise when studying marginalised and subaltern communities. This article examines vulnerability from the perspective of procedural ethics - or the formal rules and processes that guide the regulation of research ethics - by examining the concept in 44 national research ethics guidelines from around the world. The findings show that, in contrast to the relational, embedded and dynamic understanding of vulnerability elaborated by qualitative social science scholars, national research ethics documents remain heavily dominated by understandings of vulnerability originating from biomedical research, both in terms of how they define and action vulnerability and the recommendations they propose to mitigate it. For guidelines that extend their remit to the social sciences, they increasingly include caveats and nuances that help speak to the concerns of qualitative social scientists. However, they do not question key underlying assumptions that continue to create challenges for qualitative social science researchers, especially those working in a critical tradition.