Physicians, attorneys, counselors, and other professionals have a code of ethics and peer review boards or licensing regulations. The codes formalize professional standards and provide guidance when questions arise in practice.22 Social researchers do not provide a service for a fee, receive limited ethical training, and are rarely licensed. They incorporate ethical concerns into research because it is morally and socially responsible, and to protect social research from chares of insensitivity or abusing people.
Professional social science associations have code of ethics. The code state proper and improper behavior and represent and consensus of professional on ethics. All researchers may not agree on all ethical issues, and ethical rules are subject to interpretation, but researchers are expected to uphold ethical standards as part of their membership in professional community.
Codes of research ethics can be traced to the Noremberg code, which was adopted during the Noremberg Military Tribunal on Nazi war crimes held by the Allied Power immediately after World War II. The code, developed as response to the cruelty of concentration camp experiments, outlines ethical principles and right of human subjects. These include:
- The principle of voluntary consent
- Avoidance of unnecessary physical and mental suffering
- Avoidance and any experiment where death or disabling injury is likely
- Termination of research if its continuation is likely to cause injury, disability, or death
- The principle that experiments should be conducted by highly qualify people using the highest levels of skill and care
- The principle that the results should be for the good of society and unattainable by any other method
The principles in the Noremberg code dealt with the treatment of human subjects and focused on medical experimentation, but they become the basis for the ethical codes in social research. Similar codes of human rights, such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Right to the United Nation and the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki, also have implications for social researchers.23 Table 17.1 lists some of the basic principles of ethical social research.
Professional social science associations (e.g., the American Psychological Association, American Anthropological Association, American Political Science Association, and American Sociological Association) adopted codes of ethics beginning in the 1960s or 1970s. A copy of the codes of ethic for the American Association for Public Opinion Research and the American Sociological Association are provided in Appendix A. These codes are similar, and some principles in them go to beyond those in the Noremberg code.
Professional social science associations have committees the review code of ethics and hear about possible violations, but there is no strict enforcement of the codes. The penalty for a minor violation rarely goes beyond the letter. If laws have not been violated, the main penalty is the negative publicity surrounding a well – documented and serious ethical violation. The publicity may result in the loss of employment, a refusal to publish research finding in scholarly journals, and a prohibition from receiving funding for research---in other words, banishment from the community of professional researchers.
Codes of ethics do more than codify thinking among researchers and provide guidance; they also help universities and other institutions defend ethical research against abuses from external political interests. For example, after interviewing 24 staff members and conducting observation, a researcher in 1994 documented that the staff at the Milwaukee Public Defenders Office were seriously overworked and could not effectively provide legal defense for poor people. Learning of the findings, top officials at the office contacted the University and demanded to know who on their staff had talked to the researcher, with implications that they might be reprisals against the staff members. The University administration defended the researcher and refused to release the information, citing widely accepted codes that protect human research subjects.24
Among the codes of ethics, Greenwald (1992:585 – 586) remarked, “Sociology stands out among the learned profession as critical of the authority of established institutions such as government or large business firms” and its provision to “explicity state the shortcoming of methodologies and the openness of findings to varying interpretations.”