ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the main principles of ethical research outlined in the Belmont Report. The findings of this research had enormous importance, not just for the study of homosexuality in the United States, but also to the gay rights movement. Laud Humphreys showed that homosexuals were not depraved social outcasts that they had been portrayed as, but were often neighbors, husbands, fathers, and pillars of their community. Ethical lapses in scientific research first came to public attention after World War II, when the twisted experimentation Nazi scientists carried out on prisoners came to light. Rather, universities make use of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to, among other things, balance the potential harm and benefits of proposed research. There has been an enormous amount of research in sociology on how men and women portray themselves to potential mates and which strategies tend to work best.
