“Do you mind that I record it?”. Ethical issues and the observer’s paradox in social work encounters

Abstract

This article deals with some of the ethical issues encountered by social sciences researchers who adopt an ethnomethodological frame. The building of a corpus of interaction recordings requires prior authorization from those speakers involved. The analysis of the conversational sequences pertaining to the authorization requests of the recording sessions, obtained in the context of the research project on social service interviews, allowed the authors to propose an outline of their prototypical organisation and its variants, as well as to highlight the specific negotiation competence exhibited by speakers, a competence which allows them to manage, locally, the ethical issues they are faced with.