ABSTRACT
Along with increasing reflexivity in the conduct of social research inevitably comes greater awareness of ethical questions and political considerations regarding the conduct of research. For example, the 1960s saw a growing recognition of the ways in which anthropologists had aided the colonial enterprise, if only by their concentration on so-called traditional sociocultural forms at the expense of contemporary contacts and conflicts, and, in so doing, inadvertently bolstered racial prejudice at home and abroad (Willis 1969). Although most critics agree that anthropological research contributed very little directly to colonial domination, its indirect contribution to the maintenance of the status quo raises fundamental ethical questions about the nature of social research and its exploitative potential, as well as about the viability of a politically neutral position on the part of researchers (Asad 1973b, 1991). Furthermore, in 1965 came the public exposure and cancellation of Project Camelot, a social science research project funded by the United States Army, whose objectives were to assess conditions leading to internal conflict in other countries, notably initially in Chile, and to uncover means of preventing such conflict. This was followed in the 1970s with the revelation that ethnographic information had been used by the CIA to select bombing targets in Indo-China (Barnes 1977: 50-6; Horowitz 1967). These discoveries fuelled debates about the responsibilities of social researchers regarding the uses to which their findings may be put, in particular any harm that might come to participants in the research as a consequence of it. Professional organizations responded by developing ethical codes covering the conduct of social research as well as other aspects of professional ethics. It should be noted that in some countries the ethical requirements of research are mandated by legislation. For example, since 1974 the federal government in the United States has required that research review boards be established at all universities
which receive federal funding in areas of research that involve human subjects to assess the ethical bases of all such projects (cf. Sieber 1992 for a full discussion of these boards, their activities and expectations). This chapter considers some of the central features of such codes for ethical practice in social research, along with the ambiguities and debates surrounding them, in particular the areas of informed consent, covert research and questions of confidentiality. It then looks at the related area of politics in social research and, finally, considers briefly various assessments of the nature and significance of policy research.
