Research ethics
 All research has ethical implications
 Research activities can affect the health and
wellbeing of subjects and of society as a whole
 There is often a tradeoff between protection of
subjects and the potential social value of the
research
Individual v. institutional ethics
 All researchers must determine whether their research
meets their personal standards of ethics
 However, practices in the past have led to a concern
that individual ethics are not adequate to protect
research subjects
 Incentives encourage researchers to carry out even
questionable research
 Historical examples of research that are either horrific
(Nazi experiments on prisoners) or questionable at best
(Tea-room trade)
Development of institutional
safeguards
 Over time, a number of ethical critiques of research
practices has generated a variety of codes of conduct
for researchers
 The Belmont Report provides the guiding philosophy
for most institutional research ethics in the United
States today
 Basic ethical principles:
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Respect for Persons
Beneficence
Justice
Institutional Review Boards
 UK, like other research universities, has set up
boards for applying these ethical principles to
proposed research
 Required by the federal government if the institution
receives federal research funding
 At UK, these IRBs are located within the Office of
Research Integrity
 When a faculty member proposes a study she must
gain acceptance of the proposal by the IRB.
 All research, whether funded or not
 IRBs are divided into medical and non-medical IRBs
 Some focus on animal research and others on human
subjects
 Three levels of review:
 Exempt
 Expedited
 Full
 Research studies are reviewed on a regular basis or in
the case where they need to be modified or problems
have occurred
 The IRB is made up of university faculty. They
are not involved in the research they review. A
number of guidelines for research have been
written and the IRB applies them to each
research proposal. They may accept a proposal,
call for changes or reject. The researcher
cannot go forward with the research until it is
approved by the IRB.
Ethical principle #1: Respect for
persons
 Two moral requirements:
 Individuals should be treated as
autonomous agents
 Persons with diminished autonomy are
entitled to protection
Informed consent
 Informed consent is obtained when subjects are
provided with adequate information prior to a
study to determine whether they are willing to act
as a subject and they affirmatively agree to provide
information. Most social science research includes
some form of informed consent.
 An opt-out system is not acceptable
The most vulnerable groups
(special populations)
 People who are unable to adequately weigh the potential
positive and negative consequences of participation in
research
 Children
 Some elderly
 Institutionalized populations
Mental health facilities
 Prisons
 Circumstantially affected
 Just lost baby
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Informed consent for special
populations
 Often requires that someone act as a ‘guardian’ for
the member of the special population
 An adult who has the interests of the potential subject at
heart
 Often research on children cannot begin until
the parents/guardians have consented, children
have agreed to participate (if they are old
enough), and sometimes even school officials
have consented
Deception
 When subjects are in any way misled about the
nature of a study, or are given inadequate
information to weigh the pros and cons of
participation, then true informed consent is not
possible
 When considering deception, the researcher must
balance the merits of deception against its costs
 The researcher and the IRB may well be at odds over
this
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Tea-room trade
Mystery shopper
Commercial pretesting
 When deception is used, its effects should
be minimized by:
1. Providing as much true and accurate
information as possible without giving
away the deception
2. Debriefing after the data gathering is
concluded
Ethical principle 2: Beneficence
 The obligation to respect persons decisions, protect
them from harm, and secure their well-being
 Rules of beneficence:
 Do not harm
 Maximize possible benefits and minimize possible
harms
Respect for research subjects
 Treating subjects as people rather than objects
of research
 What about animals?
 Topics/manipulations that are not
appropriate
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Tuskeegee syphilis study
Obedience studies
 Giving a placebo to AIDS/cancer patient
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ACT-UP militancy
Main concerns
 Subject welfare
 Physical harm? (rare)
 Mental/emotional harm? (more common)
 Weighed against the potential social impact of
findings
 What is the potential for an increase in social
welfare?
 Is there a potential for significant social harm
resulting from the research?
Subject welfare
 Will subjects be at risk of physical harm?
 Rare occurrence
 Studies of illegal behavior
 Stanford prison experiment
 Studies of stigmatized behavior
 Gay and Lesbian studies
Mental/emotional harm
 More common
 Exposure to upsetting content
 Violence, sex, etc.
 Stress or fear
 Milgram, etc.
 Embarrassment
 Demonstration of ignorance, etc.
 Long-term effect of powerful stimulus
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Exposure to “snuff” pornography
Research anonymity/
confidentiality
 One means of protecting subjects is to
assure them that the information they give
will be held in confidence.
Anonymity
 Once the data are collected, it is no longer
possible to match the source of the data with
the actual information provided
 removal of names from data, etc.
 potential for false data (cannot call back)
Confidentiality (more common)
 Researcher agrees not to make personally
identifiable information available to third
parties
 Publish only aggregated data
 Respondent can physically be identified
 Allows for checking/validity analysis
 What if researcher is subpoenaed?
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student drinking focus group
drug survey among adolescents
Privacy has become a
significant research issue
 New technologies allow for the collection of large
amounts of personal data without respondent
awareness/knowledge
 Privacy notices are hard to understand, unclear in
their implications
 It is likely that new legal restrictions on
collection/sharing/use of data will be developed
Major concerns
 How will you handle data protection?
 What about information that was
inadvertently gathered?
 What about respondents who change their
minds?
Ethical Principle 3: Justice
 Justice concerns whether the costs and benefits of
research are fairly distributed.
 Those who pay the costs of research (either as
subjects or as taxpayers) should receive the
benefits (not being excluded from use of vaccines
due to their high cost, etc.)
 For example, if poor people serve as subjects of medical
research and then are unable to receive the medicine,
the principle of justice has been broken
Stanford Prison Experiment
 Power of the situation
 How do the three issues covered in ethics reviews relate
to the Stanford Prison Experiment?
Scientific integrity
 When using scientific methods or carrying out
scholarly research it is expected that you will follow
the dictates of science in terms of fairness and
accuracy
 Pseudo-science
 “Unscientific polls”
 Abusing science as a means of bolstering the
acceptance of non-scientific arguments is unethical
 Race
Biased data collection
 Researchers should not have an economic
(or political, etc.) stake in the outcome of
the research they conduct
 Independent evaluation
Biased data collection
 Sponsor interests
 Government
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Investment in certain topics, etc.
Influence over research
 TV violence
 Pornography
 Private organizations, foundations
 Drug companies sponsoring tests of their own
drugs
 RIAA research on music downloading
Biased reporting/use of data
 Proprietary research
 Researcher may have little control over use of
findings
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Sponsor may continue studying a topic until
he/she gets the results he wants
Tobacco advertising; culpability
 Advocacy groups
 PR, “spin”
 “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”
Public v. proprietary research
 Political concerns
 Compensation
 Access to data, reports
 Control over, interpretation of results
 Forms of influence over study design,
interpretation, use