Discomforting research: colliding moralities and looking for 'truth' in a study of parental drug problems

Research on socially-sensitive areas of human experience is particularly prone to raising thorny issues over the legitimacy and social consequences of the sociological gaze. In drugs research there is probably no more prickly a subject than the impact of a parents' problem drug use on the wellbeing and safety of children. This paper sets out to explore the processes and consequences of interpretation of narrative accounts provided by parents and their children through moving between substantive and methodological issues. Through consideration of the substantive data the paper draws away from the epistemological position that all accounts can be treated as equally valid. Instead it argues that whilst some objectified definitive 'truth' of the impact of parental problem drug use on children is not achievable, it is possible to say something of the processes by which drugs can take precedence over childcare concerns, even where some accounts are apparently contradictory. The logic of such an interpretation of a certain incompatibility between dependent drug use and childcare raises the issue of the capacity for research to harm those who form the focus of empirical research.