ABSTRACT
Children are heavily represented among victims of research, as are other socially powerless groups, such as prisoners, the mentally disabled and those living in poverty. The likelihood of being a research victim increases if one suffers from more than one of these vulnerabilities. Informed consent of the participants, as the Nuremberg Code stressed, is the key to ethical research. The idea of informed consent is based on the ethical view that all humans have the right to autonomy—that is, the right to determine what is in their own best interests. In approving a research project, an important factor to guide decision-making about its ethics is the risk/benefit equation. The idea is that the greater the benefit to be gained from a piece of research, the more risks are acceptable. In general, concern for ethics both in the planning and the execution stage of research can add to the quality of the research.
