Research Methods Dersi 7. Ünite Özet

Understanding Research Ethics

The word “ethics” can have at least two meanings. It can refer to “A field of study, concerned with investigating what is good or right and how we should determine this. On this interpretation, ‘social research ethics’ means the study of what researchers ought and ought not to do, and how this should be decided.” Alternatively, the word “ethics” can mean “A set of principles that embody or exemplify what is good or right, or allow us to identify what is bad or wrong… In these terms, the phrase ‘social research ethics’ means ‘the set of ethical principles that should be taken into account when doing social research’ or ‘the set of ethical principles held by social researchers’.”

Research Ethics as Means of Judgment and/or Evaluation

Research ethics is a matter of judgment and/ or evaluation in terms of right/wrong actions (of researchers) and/or good/bad consequences. In fact, “Making evaluations is central to all aspects of human life- we are continually engaged in judging things, including ourselves and other people. Furthermore, our evaluations can vary in several important respects; notably according to what sort of thing is being evaluated and in terms of what standard.

Research Ethics as Protecting the Rights of Research Participants

The term “research ethics” has also been associated with how researchers ought to treat research participants in terms of protecting their rights (such as causing them no harm, respecting their autonomy, or preserving their privacy, etc.).

History of Research Ethics

The phenomenon of “research ethics” was mostly resulted from the revelations regarding the appalling medical experiments conducted by some Nazi doctors in German concentration camps during the World War II. As a result of such experiments, firstly, the Nuremberg Code of 1947 was developed to outline some basic ethical principles (e.g., informed consent, avoiding harm, respecting privacy) that were anticipated to guide medical experiments. Afterwards, the Nuremburg Code’s ethical principles were clarified and supplemented in the World Medical Association’s Helsinki Declaration of 1964 as well as in the National Commission’s Belmont Report of 1979 in the USA. Initially, the ethical codes and guidelines were aimed at only biomedical research, but in many countries they were extended to all research involving humans, including both quantitate and qualitative research of all kinds.

Overview of Research Ethics Scandals

A widely accepted definition of “research misconduct”, as it appears in the USA Federal Policy on Research Misconduct is as follows:

• Research misconduct is defined as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.
• Fabrication is making up data or results and recording or reporting them.
• Falsification is manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record.
• Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.
• Research misconduct does not include honest error or honest difference of opinion.

The Little Albert Experiment in 1920

An 11-month-old infant (named Albert B.), without the knowledge or consent of his parents, was conditioned to fear rats by associating them with fear-inducing circumstances such as a loud noise.

The Nazi Experiments between 1939 and 1945

The Nazi medical experiments were carried out on concentration camp prisoners in Germany during the World War II. They “included involuntary sterilization, subjection to radiation, freezing to induce hypothermia, infection of research subjects with malaria and tuberculosis (TB), and many other unethical experiments, conducted without the consent of the research subjects, and often leading predictably to extreme pain, mutilation and death”.

The Milgram Obedience Experiments between 1960 and 1963

The Milgram obedience experiments were conducted to investigate people’s obedience to authority. However, the research participants were deceived about the nature of the research and led to believe that they were administering electric shocks to other participants. So the Milgram experiments have served two different purposes in writings about research ethics: (1) as a touchstone for discussions of the ethics of deceptive psychological research and (2) as a bad example of harm to research participants

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment between 1932 and 1972

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was carried out by the US Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama.

About 400 mostly illiterate African-Americans with syphilis were recruited into the study as well as two hundred healthy controls. The aim of the study was to observe the natural progression of the disease when left untreated, and in particular to compare the progression of the disease in African-Americans with the results of an  earlier retrospective study of the disease in Europeans. The participants were not told that they were in a medical trial, and the tests were described as ‘special free treatments’.

The most widely held criticism of the Tuskegee study centers on the absence of informed consent and the exploitation of the participants. The Tuskegee study ended in 1972 just because the ethical concerns relating to it were printed on the front page of New York Times. The national outcry that followed the shocking news about the Tuskegee experiment “was rekindled over the years and eventually resulted in a formal apology from President Clinton in 1997. Tuskegee has been heralded as a prime example of unethical and scientifically worthless research involving deliberate non-treatment, under-treatment, deception, and exploitation. The study has also been labeled racist and an example of ‘genocide’”

The Zimbardo Prison Experiment in 1971

This experiment was carried out by Philip Zimbardo as a prison experiment in which some male college students were recruited and randomly assigned the roles of “guard” and “prisoner.” Originally, the experiment was designed for a two-week time period, but ran only for six days. The reason for the early termination of the experiment was because the guards had begun to systematically abuse the prisoners through ridicule, verbal abuse, and other forms of severe treatment. The study was criticized for not informing participants about the risk of psychological stress, physical discomfort, and/or humiliation to which they were ultimately exposed.

Establishment of Research Ethics Committees (RECs)

The main role of a research ethics committee (REC) is to regulate the ethical conduct of research before it is carried out (i.e., whether the ethical principles of informed consent, confidentiality, rights to privacy, and protecting participants from harm are taken into consideration). In some occasions, RECs may also require some changes/ alterations to research projects before they allow them to continue. Yet there are contradictory views about the need, roles and/or functions of RECs in social sciences. Some researchers argue that research ethics at the procedural level have been imposed on social sciences from outside (i.e., medical science or bioethics) while others stress the importance of RECs.

Ethical Perspectives

Different ethical perspectives highlight different factors as being ethically significant. Hence, thinking about an ethical issue from multiple ethical perspectives is important in the sense that one might miss the ethical point if one addresses it from a single ethical perspective.

Deontological Ethics

As a term “deontology” refers to the study of absolute/universal duties. So all deontological arguments tend to center on “whether or not an action-proposed or performed-corresponds to some command or general rule that an agent has a duty to obey” such as “the duty of not to harm participants”, “the duty of not to lie/deceive participants”, or “the duty of not to discriminate against participants”, etc.

Consequentialist/Utilitarian Ethics

The consequentialist/utilitarian ethics perspective represents a radical rejection of deontological ethics. It argues that “Rather than being guided by general rules specifying duties and rights, actions must be judged, prospectively, in terms of how well designed they are to produce good outcomes, and, retrospectively, according to whether or not they actually produced such outcomes”. Rachels summarizes these ideas in the following three simple propositions:

• First, actions are to be judged right or wrong solely by virtue of their consequences. Nothing else matters.
• Second, in assessing consequences, the only thing that matters is the amount of happiness or unhappiness that is created. Everything else is irrelevant.
• Third, each person’s happiness counts the same.

Principle-Based Ethics (Principlism)

Principle-based ethics proposes a system of ethical reasoning based on the following four principles:

• Respect for autonomy (i.e., the obligation to respect decision-making capacities of autonomous people),
• Beneficence (i.e., the obligation to provide benefits and to balance them against risks),
• Non-maleficence (i.e., the obligation to avoid causing harm),
• Justice (i.e., the obligation of fairness in the distribution of benefits and risks).

Situation-Based Ethics (Situationism)

Situation-based ethics stresses that there would always be cases for ethical dilemmas that would be difficult to solve, and therefore there would always be disagreements about what is good/bad or right/ wrong in particular research settings/situations. Also, decisions for such ethical dilemmas could be hard to be made from deontological, consequentialist/utilitarian, and/or principle-based ethical perspectives.

Virtue Ethics

A virtue is defined as a trait of character which is manifested in the habitual action of a person and believed to be good for the person to have. Virtue ethics, then, refers to a researcher’s possession of certain traits/virtues as part of his/her character/personality such as being kind, generous, courageous, just, and prudent, etc. Indeed, “The essence of virtue ethics is that character is the primary object of ethical appraisal, and actions are judged according to what they tell us about the agent’s character”.

Relational Ethics (Ethics of Care)

Relational ethics focuses on the importance of the relationships between the researcher and participants.

Relational ethics is mostly based on the idea of “women’s basic moral orientation is caring for others- ‘taking care’ of others in a personal way, not just being concerned for humanity in general- and attending to their needs”. The relational ethics perspective suggests that researchers “ought to see people as social beings, nested within a complex set of relationships. The ethics of care concentrates on these relationships and the emotions such as sympathy and solidarity that tend to go with them”.

Other Ethical Perspectives

Guillemin and Gillam’s Perspective

Guillemin and Gillam propose a two-dimensional research ethics perspective: (1) “procedural ethics” (requiring an approval from a relevant REC to undertake research) and (2) “ethics in practice” (representing the everyday ethical issues in doing research). They contend that procedural ethics cannot provide all that is needed for dealing with “ethically important moments” that may arise, especially, when undertaking qualitative research.

Tracy’s Perspective

Tracy proposes a four-dimensional research ethics perspective: (1) procedural ethics, (2) situational ethics, (3) relational ethics, and (3) exiting ethics.

Ethical Principles

This section discusses in-depth the three most widely recognized ethical principles in international guidelines: (1) autonomy and informed consent, (2) balancing research risks and benefits, and (3) privacy, anonymity and confidentiality.

Autonomy and Informed Consent

There is almost a universal agreement that informed consent is of the most important ethical principle in research ethics. By way of informed consent, the prospective research participant comes to an understanding of the goals of a research and of what participation in it would involve so that he/she can make his or her own free decision about whether, and under what conditions, to participate.

The issue of informed consent arises primarily in the following three situations:

• When researchers are seeking entry to settings to which they do not automatically have access as ‘members of the public’ or as citizens,
• When they are trying to obtain documents that are not publicly available, and
• When they want to elicit information or data from people through interviews, questionnaires, diaries, and so on. In order for informed consent to be considered valid it must meet at least the following three criteria:
• Adequate information
• Voluntariness
• Competence

Balancing Research Risks and Benefits

Another most important ethical principle involved in the discussions of research ethics is related to the “risk of harm” that might result from the actions of researchers. It is argued that researchers should not cause harm to their participants, but benefit them. Yet some kind (and/ or degree) of harm is probably unavoidable in any kind of research endeavor. Also, what counts as a significant/serious harm is a matter of judgment on the parts of different persons.

The potential threats of harm arising from research can fall into the following five categories:

• Pain, physical injury, and permanent disability.
• Psychological damage, for instance emotional distress, erosion of self-confidence, stress-related illness, and so on.
• Material damage of some kind, for example loss of one’s freedom through imprisonment, dismissal from one’s job, reduction in income or wealth, damage to property, and so on.
• Damage to reputation or status, or to relations with significant others, for example through the disclosure of information that was previously unknown to some relevant audience.
• Damage to a project in which people are engaged, to some group or organization to which they belong, perhaps even to some institution or occupation in which they participate.

Privacy, Anonymity and Confidentiality

European Commission defines “privacy” as the protection of “control over information about oneself; control over access to oneself, both physical and mental; and control over one’s ability to make important decisions about family and lifestyle in order to be self-expressive and to develop varied relationships.” Privacy is also related to the issue of protecting both personal territory and information.

The question of “what should be private or secret” or “what can or must be made public” can be a contradictory matter for some research settings.

Anonymity and confidentiality are the two strategies used to maintain/protect privacy. For example, there are several ways to secure the anonymity of personal information.

“The most obvious one is to replace actual names with invented ones. Another is to refer to people solely by the roles that they play: doctor, nurse, patient, relative, and so on. Alternatively, first names without second names, or just initials, may be used; or numbers or letters of the alphabet. Alongside these devices, any personal characteristics of people, or contextual features of places, that could lead to their identification may be omitted from accounts, or even changed in order to provide disguise”.

Ethics in Qualitative Research

The following are four broad issues that can produce ethical dilemmas for all researchers:

• Research sponsorship
• Research relations
• Informed consent
• Data dissemination

Reflexivity in Qualitative Research

The essence of reflexivity in qualitative research is related to “a process of critical reflection both on the kind of knowledge produced from research and how that knowledge is generated”.

Reflexivity can take many forms. Three types of reflexivity is mainly introduced:

Self-reflexivity as a representation of the researcher’s voice

Participant reflexivity as a representation of the participant’s voice

Radical reflexivity as a representation of a shared voice

Reflections on Some Ethical Dilemmas in Qualitative Research

Ethical dilemmas are part of every-day practice of doing qualitative research. An ethical dilemma can be defined as “a situation in which there is a stark choice between different options, each of which seem to have equally compelling ethical advantages and disadvantages”.