ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the core ethical principles that shape quantitative research on social justice scholarship. Ethics are integral to all aspects of research including research topics, questions, methods, participants, instrumentation, data collection, analysis, and dissemination. Beyond egregious ethical misconduct, we discuss the more complex and subtler ethical dilemmas that social justice researchers might encounter in their work. We urge our readers, as quantitative criticalists, to reflect on whose interests are served through research and the purposes for which research is used. We elaborate on ethical principles such as voluntary participation, integrity, respect, justice, beneficence, consent, inclusion, self-reflexivity, and cultural humility. The ways in which legal or procedural ethics, professional codes, and personal values influence research are examined. Specific ethical considerations relevant to communicative contexts such as internet research, social media research, bioethics, and computational analytics are discussed. The importance of social responsibility, ethics of care, voices of marginalized groups, and avoidance of tokenism and deficit thinking in conducting social justice research is emphasized. The chapter concludes with several applied case studies that focus on situational ethics.
