Between Rigour and Ethics in Studies Involving Participants with Disabilities: A Tutorial

ABSTRACTEvery year, many research projects are conducted within the field of interactive information retrieval on a broad diversity of users. Over the last few decades, an increasing number of studies have addressed user groups that may be defined as minority groups, such as people with disabilities. There is still a need for more studies on such user groups. The question, however, is how to conduct research on cohorts that might be regarded as 'vulnerable participants'. Previous research has showed that one cannot always conduct rigorous experiments for all types of users, and there are many issues to be raised in this regard, e.g ethical considerations. This tutorial addresses the responsibility of the researcher to consider how to conduct experiments where there might be a mismatch between rigour and ethics. Users with disabilities will be used as case studies, but many of the topics may have transfer value to other cohorts regarded as 'vulnerable participants'.