ABSTRACT
As a student, when you are first learning how to conduct research, it is unlikely that ethical issues are your foremost considerations. With so much to learn about the steps of conducting research, research design, and statistical analyses, research ethics may sound like an important, but not a pressing, subject. In this chapter, I hope to disabuse you of the idea that ethical principles may be thought of, if at all, as a final step in research design. It is not true that ethical issues are mutually exclusive from research issues; on the contrary, it is reasonable to argue that “ethics and scientific inquiry are very closely interrelated” (Rosenthal, 1994, p. 127). Researchers should recognize that methodology and ethics must work together, as reflected in this statement by Sieber (1992):
Before delving further into research ethics, consider the following examples of three controversial research projects. Think about your response to these studies as if you were a subject.Would youwant to participate in these studies? Does your answer change depending on the potential value of the study in increasing our knowledge base? Is it possible to design these studies to avoid the ethical dilemmas the researchers faced?
