ABSTRACT
Research design requires considerations of methodologies that will best collect and summarize the events and their impacts on human subjects and the natural environment. This research must take into account the ethical standards that will impact the designs that are used and how they are implemented in the field and in practical application. University institutional review boards enforce general norms of human subject research in the social sciences as articulated by the Belmont Report. But ethical considerations for field research go beyond these norms. How do researchers avoid re-traumatizing participants as they relive the disaster? How are the experiences of first responders best captured? What are the challenges of being a participant observer? What are the ethical issues in quasi-experimental designs? How does bias impact case studies through topic selection, research question design, and test subject selection? How does a researcher ethically manage self-selection bias to avoid false assumptions and findings? How do “incentives” influence participation and outcomes? These and other challenges will be raised and explored using interviews with disaster researchers, examination of disaster research protocols, and case studies from fieldwork in actual disasters.
