Informed consent in ethnographic research: A common practice facing new challenges

Abstract

In this article, we give some insight into the growing debate on informed consent among social and cultural anthropologists in Germany and beyond that takes as its current starting point the wider debate on the impacts of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as well as the requirements of research data management and archiving. This critical debate centres two aspects: the standardized written form and the time of consenting. We use examples from the broader field of qualitative social scientific research when they address similar problems. Subsequently we outline proceedings that could lead to non-written forms of consenting, which have proven more appropriate to ethnographic fieldwork.