Engaging Ethically in Dance for Health Research

All dance research involving participant dancers necessitates ethical thinking. Dance for Health (DfH) research often engages individuals and groups of people who may be deemed ‘vulnerable’, necessitating additional ethical considerations. Additionally, DfH researchers are often engaging with individuals accessing a particular activity for their own enjoyment, that may alleviate some of their symptoms, and that helps them ‘live well’ with a particular condition.

Research ethics can be viewed within the academy as something of a ‘tick box exercise’, beginning with an application to an institutional or organisational ethics board. Yet, a deeper consideration of how we engage ethically can result in more meaningful understanding of the researcher–dancer encounter, and greater quality of data and integrity in research. Certain approaches such as ‘attentiveness’, ethnographic methods, and researcher flexibility, relating, for example, to verbal communication, physical touch, and the significance of gaining data ‘in the moment’, may be drawn upon to support the processes of informed consent and data collection.

Here, this chapter explores characteristics of DfH research and key literature foregrounding the relationship between dance and ethics and explore examples of researcher learning from working with participant dancers living with Parkinson’s and dementia. In doing so, consider what happens in the practical space of a DfH research project and centre the importance of ethics.