How would you react if a person unexpectedly collapsed in front of you, perhaps with blood dripping from his mouth? Would you become upset? Is it ethical for researcher secretly to stage such behavior for people riding in a sub way car, just to see how they react? Should you protect research subjects from the risk of being arrested simply because they were in a study? For example, in a field research study on a gang, you learn that the gang plans to rob a liquor store. What do you do ---call the police, leave when the illegal behavior is discussed, tell gang member of the dilemma, destroy all your notes, or go to jail for refusing to cooperate with the police? Should you compromise the standards of good research in order to keep a job? For example, you get a job doing research for a government agency. Your preliminary results show that the agency is wasteful and disorganized. Your supervisor tells you to destroy these result and rig the study by using a biased sample and questionnaire. What do you do---go along to keep you job, or blow the whistle and cause controversy?
In this chapter, you will learn about the ethics and politics of social research. This final chapter touches all of topics covered previously. It involves serious issues that you will probably continue to think about after finishing this book.
The researcher faces many ethical dilemmas and must decide how to act. Codes of ethics and other researcher provide guidance, but ethical conduct ultimately depends on the individual researcher. The researcher has a moral and professional obligation to be ethical, even when research subjects are unaware of or unconcerned about ethics. Indeed, many subjects are less concerned about protecting their privacy and other rights than are researchers.1
The ethical issues are the concerns, dilemmas, and conflicts that arise over the proper way to conduct research. Ethics define what is or is not legitimate to do, or what “moral” research procedure involves. There are few ethical absolutes. Most issues involve trade – offs between competing values and depend on the specific situation.
Although there are few fixed rules, there are agreed – upon principles may conflict in practice. Many ethic issues involve a balance between two values: the pursuit of scientific knowledge and the rights of those being studied or of others in society. Potential benefits such as advancing our understanding of social life, improving decision making, or helping research participants must be weighed against potential costs such as a lot of dignity, self – esteem, privacy, or democratic freedoms.
The standards for ethical research are stricter than those in many other areas of society (e.g., collection agencies, police department, and advertiser). Professional research requires both knowledge of proper research techniques (e.g., sampling) and sensitivity to ethical concerns in research. This is not easy. As Renolds (1979:7) observed. “The types of dilemmas now being confronted by social scientists have received attention for centuries by those concerned with general problem in moral, legal, and political philosophy.”