ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the origins of ethics in educational research, and discusses ethics and politics in/of educational research. It discusses the nature of ethical dilemmas in educational research, and also presents the ethical drift in educational research. Ethical dilemmas present the educational researcher with difficult decisions. Ethical dilemmas in educational research are the result of conflicts between potential benefits or harms for two or more competing interests. Understanding the politics of knowledge production requires that researchers look beyond the antecedents of unethical behaviour and focus on possible interventions rather than descriptions of the status quo, thereby recognizing the political forces in play rather than allowing ethical practice to drift. The origins of ethics in research takes direction from the history of medical research, which has been at the forefront of the ethics of research involving humans, both with respect to the development of vocabularies and frameworks and with respect to the formulation of federal policy.
