When you begin your research it can be difficult to anticipate possible ethical issues that might arise. Setting up a steering group of people from different walks of life, skills and experience to give you honest, constructive feedback will help with this process.

Make sure your critical friends include representatives from all your stakeholders including people who can benefit from your research as well as individuals who could be harmed by it. Using the Critical Friend Map can enable you to identify the types of knowledge and expertise you might require.

The map is catagorised by people with:

We have included a set of Critical Friend Role Cards. It’s important to find out how these critical friends might want to be involved. As an activity, ask the critical friends to define their role and what they would like to contribute to the project.

Some critical friends might want to be more, or less involved during different milestones of the project. The project itself may also require different critical friends at different times. We have included a Milestones Map to enable you to start to think about when different people are likely to be involved. This can be used with your critical friends or as a team exercise. Naturally, this may alter over the duration of the project.

As you are facilitating the activities, it’s important that another team member is in charge of capturing the discussions and decisions.

For the critical friend activities we have enclosed 2 worksheets to help in capturing an overview that can be referred to throughout your project: