Ethical Considerations in

Sociological Research
 The instructor of SOC101 announced one day that
the class of that day would be divided into two
parts. In the first part, the instructor would
present his lecture, and in the second part the
students would be required to complete a survey
questionnaire. He emphasized that participation
in the survey was mandatory for all students
present in that class. Is there any ethical issue
involved in this event?
A. Yes

B. No
 A researcher was interested to study how children
respond to stress. To empirically observe
children’s responses to stress, the researcher took
some children to a thick forest in an evening and
left them there. He then observed from a certain
distance (from where he was not visible to the
children) how they were reacting to this situation?
Do you think that the study was ethically
conducted?
A. Yes
B. No
 Dr. Nawaj conducted a study among employees of
a garment factory about their feelings of being
exploited by the owners. Many employees said
that they were being exploited by the owners
while many said the opposite. Findings of study
was published in local newspaper where the
author presented the evidence in such a way that
the employees could be identified in terms of
their responses. Is there any ethical issue involved
in the above instance?
A. Yes
B. No
 Dr. Julia examined the effectiveness of a new drug
among some of her patients. She did not inform
those patients (the subjects) about the purpose of
her study and she did not ask for their consent
before subjecting them to that treatment. She
feared that she would not be able to obtain their
consent if she informed them about the study. Do
you think that this experiment was ethical?
A. Yes
B. No
 Maria, social worker, was interested in the lives
and experiences of sex traders. With this end, she
conducted in-depth interviews of some sex
traders of a small town and published those
interviews in local newspaper. As a result, the
identities of those sex traders became publicly
disclosed. Do you think what Maria did was
ethical?
A. Yes
B. No
 HELP is a government funded social program that
assists international students with academic skill
building. A comprehensive evaluation of the
program found no significant effect of HELP on its
clients’ skill building. However, to ensure the
continuity of funding, the agency that was running
the program changed some results of the
evaluation to prove that the program was still
useful. Do you thing that the manipulation of
research findings is unethical?
A. Yes
B. No
 Contextualizing Ethics in Social Research

 Scientific practices in the social field are not

straightforward.
 There are many issues to deal with
(administrative, Legal, and ethical)
 Research involves compromise with diverse
constraints
 What is Ethics?
 Ethics is the study of “right behavior”.
 This is a branch of philosophy and theology.
 Both theological ethicists, who define the field
on the basis of religious traditions and sacred
text, and philosophical ethicists who define it
strictly on the basis of reasoning independent
of religious faith, are concerned with the same
fundamental question: What ought to be
done?
The demand for standardizing the codes of
conduct
Given that there are ambiguities surrounding
issues of moral conducts and to protect human
subjects from potential harm, the demand for
standardizing moral codes of conduct for
researchers became strong after the Second World
War. Different institutions, funding agencies, and
organizations, professions and disciplines
formulated their own ethical guidelines.
Three broad areas of ethical concern in
scientific research
 The ethics in data collection and data analysis:
researchers are expected to be careful and
forthright in observing, analyzing, and reporting
findings.
 The ethics of treatment of participants: scientists
have ethical obligations regarding the treatment of
human subjects.
 The ethics of responsibility to society: ethical
concerns arising from the relationship between
science and society – the use of scientific
knowledge.
Ethical issues concerning data collection, data
analysis and reporting findings
The demand for intellectual integrity
This issue arises from researchers’ ethical
obligations to their colleagues in the scientific
community and to their discipline to make sure
that their data are sound and trustworthy. Since
scientific progress rests upon the trustworthiness
of findings from researchers’ investigations,
dishonesty and inaccuracy in reporting undermine
science itself. Scientific norms, therefore, demand
intellectual integrity.
Intellectual integrity requires that scientists be:
 “Unremittingly honest” in their observation and
analysis
 Tolerant

 Questioning

 Willing to admit error

 Willing to place the pursuit of knowledge and

understanding above personal gain or the
promotion of a particular philosophy or ideology.
How are the norms of intellectual integrity violated
(Scientific misconduct)?
Through manipulation or complete fabrication of data.
This may occur in many ways:
 Remove particular cases from the study to achieve a
significant difference between experimental
conditions.
 Fail to report a finding that contradicts one’s
hypothesis
 Search for statistical techniques which are
inappropriate but improve the appearance of the data
yielding significant result.
How can you conform to intellectual integrity?
 A researcher should be familiar with the shortcomings
and failures of the research (from planning to reporting).
 A research has an ethical obligation to make such
shortcomings known to the readers (that is include the
shortcoming in the report)
 Negative findings should be reported even if they are at
all not related to the analysis: such as your finding does
not support your expectations in the hypothesis
 Do not fabricate your research planning and strategy
(you do not need to save your face)
(Attention: Science progresses through honesty and
openness; ego-defense and deception retard it. You serve
your peers by both your discoveries as well as through
sharing the shortcomings and limitations in your study.)
Treatment of Human Subjects:

Four problem areas regarding the ethical

treatment of human subjects:

 lack of informed consent

 harm
 deception
 privacy/confidentiality
 Voluntary Participation

 Participation in research must be voluntary

 Why?
 Participants do not request their participation (it is
the interviewers who knock on their doors).
 Participation requires participants’ time, energy and
affect their regular activity
 Participation requires revelation of personal
information (sometimes very personal) to unknown
persons, very often without any direct personal
interest (even though researchers sometimes claim
that participation will help all humanity).
Norms regarding research participation
 Despite justified claims by researchers,
participation must be voluntary, and no one
should be forced to participate. Therefore,
participants must be clearly informed that their
participation in the study is absolutely voluntary
and there are no special rewards for participation.
 Special attention should be given to vulnerable
subjects who may feel forced to participate
(children, students, prisoners, subordinate
employees) .
The norm of voluntary participation conflicts
with science
 Generalizibility of findings is sometimes
threatened.
 In field research opportunity to volunteer is
impossible.
Suggestions
Although the norm of voluntary participation is
important, it is sometimes impossible to follow.
Even if you sometime find it to be justified to
avoid this norm, you should still be respectful and
careful about other norms (discussed below)
 No Harm
 The first right of any participant in a research is
the right to personal safety. A researcher must
recognize this right and respect it. Research that
would endanger the life or physical health of a
human subject is not simply acceptable to the
social science community.
 In principle, social research should never injure
the people being studied regardless of whether
they volunteer for the study.
Harms that social science research are likely to involve: (physical
harm is very unlikely social research)

 Personal: revealing some information may embarrass them

(deviant behavior – gang engagement, cheating,
undesirable sexual behavior; unpopular attitude – racism,
aggression), endanger their personal life (home life,
friendship, jobs etc), or seem to be demeaning (such as low
income, welfare payment)
 Psychological: consistent mental agony may result out of
realization from participation that certain behavior in the
past was immoral or unjust; loss of self-esteem may occur
due to probing questions.
 Unanticipated harm: It is often difficult to predict whether
or the extent to which one’s investigation procedures will
be harmful to participants (Phillip Zimbardo’s prison
experiment).
(A researcher must be sensitive to potential harms to subjects, and
guard against them )
 All research somehow involves the risks of
injuring other people: What to do?

 Risks of harm vary across research designs, and a

researcher must look for the subtlest dangers.
(if a research procedure seems likely to produce unpleasant effects
for subjects (asking survey respondent about deviant behavior), the
researcher should have the firmest scientific ground to do that.); that
is, experiment would involve a higher level of risks.

 Conduct a cost-benefit analysis

(In most cases, researchers capture a teleological position: weight
potential harm against prospective benefits from the study. Modern
research ethics suggests a favorable harms-benefit balance – the
foreseeable harms should not outweigh anticipated benefits.)
“If there is little or no scientific value from a
study that knowingly exposes subjects to harm,
the study should not be done, no matter how
small the harm. But if a study has considerable
scientific merit, some degree of potential harm
may be justified.”
(Singleton and Straits, 2005: 519)
How should a researcher handle the issue of
harms morally?
 The researcher should inform subjects of any reasonable or
foreseeable risks or discomfort before the study begins and
give subjects sufficient opportunity to consider whether to
participate (informed consent).
 Where possible, researchers should screen out
participants who might be harmed by the research
procedures.
 If stress or potential harm is possible, measure should be
taken to assess the harm after the study, and research
participants should be informed of procedures to contact
the investigator (debriefing discussed later).
 If long-lasting harms are possible, the researcher has an
obligation to conduct follow-up interviews and possibly to
provide counseling.
(Decide whether to undertake the study > identify most risky areas and
procedure > Handle these issue with care)
 Informed Consent
 The ethical norms of voluntary participation and no harms
to participant are formalized in the concept of Informed
Consent.
 Informed consent means that voluntary participation must
be decided on the basis of a full understanding of the
possible risks involved.
 The researcher must inform the subjects that their
participation is voluntary, and he must provide them with
enough information about the research (its goal, its
sponsor, chief investigator, potential risks involved) so that
they can make informed decision about whether to
participate.
 The subjects will be required to sign a statement indicating
that they are aware of the risks involved and choose to
participate anyway.
Moral and Practical implications of Informed
Consent:
(Informed consent protects both subjects and
researchers)
 It protects subjects from harm in that they are
now able to make up their own minds about the
risks of participation
 Researchers are legally protected by subjects’
explicit voluntary agreement to participate.
Methodological problems with informed
consent
 Requiring signature on a consent form reduces
response rate.
 It elicits socially desirable responses in surveys
 In laboratory experiments, the provision of full
information about the study can completely
undermine its validity.
 Deception
The most controversial area of ethical concern but widely used and
accepted practice in social research
Deception
Deception in research refers to hiding one’s
identity as a researcher and/or concealing to or
misleading the participants about the purpose of
the study. Of, course the most common
deception involves misleading subjects about the
purpose of the study.
Rationale for Deception
 The basic rationale for deception is that it is
necessary in order to place research participants
in a mental position where they will behave
naturally.
 Deception is in itself unethical. However, if for
the sake of the study deception is necessary, it
has to be justified by compelling scientific
concerns.
 Debriefing: an ethical means to address deception
 What is debriefing?
 Debriefing involves interviewing the subjects after
the study to determine if the experiment generated
any problem and then attempting to correct that
problem.
 Even though subjects can not be told the true
purpose of the study prior to their participation,
the researcher must explain to the subjects about
the true purposes of the study and the reason for
deception. It has to be done with great care and
sensitivity.
 Telling them the truth afterward may make up for
having to lie to them at the outset.
 Anonymity and Confidentiality
Two techniques to protect privacy of the respondents.
 What does the right to privacy mean?

The right to privacy is a basic individual right. It

refers to individual’s right to decide when, where, to
whom, and to what extent his or her attitudes,
beliefs, and behavior will be revealed.
 Social research and the invasion of privacy

 In many ways social research may come to direct

conflict with the value of privacy.
1. Use of concealed devices (such as one-way mirrors,
microphones, cameras).
 If such devices are used with subjects’ knowledge
and consent, they pose no problem.
 If they are used without subjects’ knowledge to record
behavior in public places, they are also acceptable so
long as subjects remain unanimous and are not at
risks.
 However, when hidden recording devices are used to
observe behavior in private settings to which the
research participant would not ordinarily allow the
researcher access, an invasion of privacy occurs.
 2. Use of false cover: Use of false cover to gain
information which subjects would not reveal if their
informed consents were obtained.
 3. Extent of privacy: Whether access to information is
violation of privacy depends upon how private the
information is. (some information is more private and
sensitive than others).
 Anonymity and Confidentiality
 Anonymity: Anonymity is guaranteed in a
research project when neither the researcher nor
the readers of the findings can identify a given
response with a given respondent (such as, mail
surveys).
 Confidentiality: A research project guarantees
confidentiality when the researcher can identify a
given person’s responses but promise not to do so
publicly. (in person interviews)
How to guarantee confidentiality?

 Train interviewers and others who have access to

identification of respondents.
 Remove all identifying information as soon as it is
no longer necessary.
 In surveys, replace names and addresses with
identification numbers.
 In cases of field research using code is an
excellent technique to maintain confidentiality of
information.