Composite actors as participant protection: methodological opportunities for ethnographers

Jennifer MJ Yim, Ph.D., Independent Scholar, is the executive director of the Utah Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission, an independent state government commission that evaluates the performance of Utah judges for voters. For over 20 years, she has served in a variety of justice system roles, including the merit selection process for judges and magistrate at the state and federal court levels, a parole board member in the juvenile justice system, and primary staff to the Utah Judicial Council's Task Force on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Legal System. Her research interests focus on conceptions of fairness in the justice system and implicit bias minimization efforts for group decision-making contexts. Her dissertation, Delinquency's treatment: Why interactions produce policy and identity in secure juvenile facilities, won the Leonard D. White Award for best dissertation in public administration.

Peregrine Schwartz-Shea is Professor Emerita, Political Science Department at the University of Utah. She published her early research using experimental methods and rational choice theory. Shifting theoretical interests led to research focusing on methodological practices in political science and interpretive methods. With Dvora Yanow she is coeditor of the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods, and their coauthored Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes (2012) is the first volume in the series. They have been collaborating on institutional review board policy research and other projects since 2006. She served on the Ad Hoc Committee on Human Subjects Research (2017–2020), which produced Research Ethics Guidelines for the American Political Science Association. Since 2020, she serves on the editorial board of American Political Science Review and its Advisory Board for Research Ethics.