Introduction to Research

Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, PhD

Department of Political Science and Public Administration,
Babcock University
Ilisan-Remo, Ogun State, Nigeria
Email: yacob-halisoo@babcock.edu.ng; jumoyin@yahoo.co.uk
Mobile: +234-802-306-5842; 806-956-1628

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Being a chapter submitted to Nigerian Political Science Association book titled, “Research
Methodology in Social Science Analysis”, 2016.

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Chapter 1 – Introduction to Research

Prologue

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was
twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining
his wives’ mouths. – Bertrand Russell

We [Political Scientists] are inclined to regard the library as the laboratory of

political science, the storehouse of original sources, the collection of ultimate
material…but for most purposes books are no more the original sources for
the physiology of politics than they are for geology or astronomy. The main
laboratory for the actual working of political institutions is not a library, but
the outside world of public life. It is there that the phenomena must be sought.
It is there that they must be opened at first hand.” (A. Lawrence Lowell, 1910,
emphasis mine).

Perhaps there is no other topic in the entire academic enterprise that both perplexes and
fascinates students and scholars alike, other than the topic of research. Research is the core,
the reason, the modus operandi, the beginning and the end of systematic study of any kind,
ancient or modern. Social scientists, in seeking to better apprehend the social world, and
political scientists as part of this milieu, consider research to be the means for achieving this.
The more years one spends pursuing a formal education, and the higher one goes up the
academic ladder, the more sophisticated and even recondite research, its language and
techniques, tend to become. This chapter is an introduction to the basis and basic principles,
concepts, types and processes, including a discussion of ethical principles and rules in social
science research.

As one of the social sciences, political science studies the behaviour of human beings in their
social, in this case, political, contexts. The discipline has undergone tremendous
metamorphosis over time and this has impacted the development of theory and methods of
research. The “traditional” study of politics involved attempts by philosophers such as
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Mills, Bentham and others to apprehend fundamental
social and political issues of their day. Aristotle, considered the founder of political science
(Roskin et al 2008), called it a “master science” but certainly there was still a long way to go
before the study of politics acquired scientific characteristics. Initial formal study of politics

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focused almost exclusively on political institutions from normative, prescriptive and
descriptive approaches. The entrance of the twentieth century changed all that. Scholars of
politics, especially in the United States began to question the traditional approach and to
advocate the development of a more nuanced, evidence-based, human-centred approach to
the study of politics. The establishment of the American Political Science Association in
1903 and the journal which sought to define the nascent discipline, the American Political
Science Review in 1906, heralded the formalisation of a discipline set apart from history,
law, social science and others. Developments in other social sciences such as economics and
psychology especially in the post-World War Two era moved political science inevitably into
the behavioural-scientific revolution (Varma 1975). Scholars like Charles Merriam Graham
Wallace, A. Lawrence Lowell, David Easton, Harold Lasswell, V. O. Key, David Truman,
Leonard White and Woodrow Wilson, some of behaviouralism’s proponents, expressed an
intense dissatisfaction with the state of the discipline prior to this. A. Lawrence Lowell
(1889) in his book Essays on Government, articulated the shortcomings of the traditional
approach succinctly:

Anyone who attempts to study a carpet loom or, even an ordinary steam
engine, when at rest will find its mechanisms hard to understand. The same
principle applies to the study of politics, for the real mechanism of
government can be understood only by examining it in action. (in Varma
1975: 10, emphasis mine).

Two main ideas energised the behavioural movement in political science: the new focus on
the individual as the central and critical datum of political analysis, and the emphasis on the
use of scientific-empirical research methods for the study of politics. The current
preoccupation with empirical political analysis, the continuous study of political science
research methodologies, and the evaluation of research by its empirical credentials were
outgrowths of the behavioural movement which revolutionised the study of politics. This
chapter expounds on the underlying principles of empirical political science research.

The Nature of Human Inquiry

What do we know, and how do we know what we know? The fundamental human propensity
to know for certain the nature and dynamics of the world around drives the search for
knowledge that can be relied upon as “true” or certain, in other words, what is fact. Curiosity
and necessity, according to Manheim and Rich (1995), are the primary motives underlying

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human inquiry. However, academic traditions differ on the discoverability of “fact”, and in
the approach towards discovering it. At the most basic, we all know something about our
selves, our lives, our environment, other people, the world, and even the universe. Most
people know that the moon hangs in the sky, that a ball thrown up in the air will fall back to
the ground, that an uncaged charging lion is a threat to their life, that a spray of water will get
them damp or wet, and so on. But, how do we know these things are real or are “fact”?

Various explanations can be advanced to account for this question. There are several ways by
which we know, that is, various approaches to apprehending knowledge:

1. Experience, it is said, is the best teacher. A child soon knows for sure that a hot pot
burns when s/he gets burnt by touching a hot pot. Human beings definitely privilege
experiential knowledge over opposing information being thrust at them from other
sources because a person’s personal encounter with any particular phenomenon
provides a more powerful and more convincing description than any that could be told
by others to the contrary. Therefore, one primary means by which we acquire
knowledge is through this personal knowing, which is experience. It must be noted
however, that because experience is personal and therefore subjective, knowledge
thus gained may not be acceptable to others if they are not provided with evidence of
how such knowledge is gained.
2. Tradition. Inevitably, much knowledge is gained from commonly held beliefs about
the world around us, passed on in the process of socialisation, and constantly being
thrust upon us by society. The fact that others before us and after accepted these
traditions makes them more easily acceptable to us as knowledge, and we seldom
interrogate these widely held assumptions. The advantage of knowledge gained by
tradition is that we do not have to build knowledge on a particular aspect of reality
from the scratch. Knowledge, being cumulative, is enhanced when we already have a
foundation to build new knowledge acquired upon. However, tradition may also deter
us from further investigation, and thus deny us additional knowledge (Babbie 2008).
3. Authority. Another powerful means of gaining new knowledge is through persons or
means deemed authoritative on the subject matter, or for whom we already have an
unquestioning belief in the unimpeachability of their assertions. A girl may believe
the mother who tells her that a boy’s touch will result in pregnancy; many Christians
take as authoritative the claims of the Holy Bible; and many of us rely on the doctor’s
expertise in order to accept new information about our personal health. These

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 methods of authority are valuable for building on received knowledge, but as is
obvious in the examples given here, authority may be misleading, or may obstruct our
ability to seek new knowledge that may yield different information from what we had
learnt previously.
4. A priori versus a posteriori knowledge: When certain propositions are considered
acceptable on the basis that their truism rests on obvious reason, an innate capacity to
grasp what makes sense, or on rational intuition, such knowledge is deemed as
deriving from residual or “former” (priori) knowledge (Frankfort-Nachmias et al
2015). Scholars who have advocated this kind of knowledge are also known as
rationalists. We all rely to some extent on our intuition as well as that indefinable
thing called commonsense to help navigate the deluge of information we encounter on
a daily basis and to choose what to accept as knowledge. The alternative mode of
gaining knowledge, the a posteriori method, privileges sensory experience as the only
valid means of acquiring new knowledge. In other words, knowledge is that gained
from the validation of our five senses – sight, sound, taste, touch and hearing – and
anything outside these that cannot be verified by these senses cannot be accepted.
This is the empirical mode of knowledge acquisition.
5. Science: Each of the means of knowing discussed above have their relevance but none
allows us reach a comprehensive, shared understanding based on shared facts,
conclusions and a shared agreement of how these conclusions were reached
(Mannheim and Rich 1995). There is a sense in which “science” is a combination of
some of the above means of acquiring knowledge, yet it stands apart from them in
very clear ways too. The word “science” comes from the Latin, scire, meaning, “to
know.” According to Earl Babbie (2008: 12), the two pillars of science are logic and
observation, that is, “a scientific understanding of the world must (1) make sense and
(2) correspond with what we observe.” Our preoccupation in this book is with
knowledge gained by the method of science and the various chapters will elaborate
how this works and contributes to our knowledge of the world.

While the science of knowing is called epistemology, the systematic process by which we
arrive at scientific knowledge is called the scientific methodology. While it is possible to
acquire knowledge in several non-scientific ways as we have outlined above, it is the unique
methodology applied that makes science what it is (Frankfort-Nachmias et al 2015).

What is Research?

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 Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose –
Zora Neale Hurston

Everyone claims to be carrying out “research”, from the primary school pupil who is told to
look up some information on the internet, to the new mom who buys books to help her
navigate the process of caring for an infant for the first time, and to the academic whose life
seems to be bound and chained to the thing called “research” for his/her livelihood. Research
is certainly far more than the first two examples cited here, and must be distinguished from
mere gathering of information or data necessary for an assignment or to serve a purpose. Of
course, at the most basic, research is the activity used to gain a better understanding of the
world, and in political science, it is the means by which we add to our understanding of
politics and the political aspect of social reality. Straus and Corbin (1998) appropriately
define research as “the process of systematically acquiring data to answer a question or solve
a problem.” More broadly, research covers a wide range of activities connected with the
generation of knowledge. An embracing definition states that:

“Research” means gathering, processing and interpreting data. It also means

intelligently and cogently communicating the results in a report that describes
what was discovered from the research. Knowing how to interpret and
evaluate research that has been done by academics, administrators, or contract
research organisations is another important [research] skill (McNabb 2004: 3,
emphasis in original).

Therefore, we may rightly conceive research as encompassing the entire process by which
information (data) about a specific phenomenon of interest is apprehended, produced,
analysed, interpreted, communicated and evaluated. However, in order to clarify even further,
it is necessary to delineate some of the other related activities that do not qualify as research
in and of themselves. I highlight three of such, adapted from Leedy and Ormrod (2010):

1. Research is not mere information gathering. Simply going on the internet to google
details or gather facts about a topic of current interest in order to gain an
understanding for whatever purpose, is not research.
2. Research is not mere transportation of facts from one location to another. The
movement of information from a scholarly source into a student’s term-paper does not
constitute research in so far as the student or other author does not take those facts for
a spin by analysing and interpreting them and giving them meaning.

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 3. Research cannot be just a catchword to catch attention. When used simply to
legitimise a product, by claiming that it was the product of “research”, this use of the
term is misleading and quite meaningless.

Scientific research specifically, has unique advantages over other methods of knowledge
acquisition. It is explicit, systematic and controlled (Mannheim and Rich 1995). By being
explicit, we mean that all the parameters and rules for studying phenomena are clearly stated
and observable empirically. It is systematic because the processes are rationally and logically
linked together from beginning to the end, the methods are carefully executed, and rigour is
observed without allowance for chance and carelessness. And, scientific research is
controlled because the elements of reality that are studied are as much as possible observed
under stringent conditions and conclusions reached thereafter from careful analysis. We may
concur thus with McNabb (2004) following from Rosenthal and Rosnow (1991) that
scientific research is not simply a fixed procedure for approaching reality. More than that, it
is a philosophy of investigation, whatever the subject matter under scrutiny may be, and
regardless of the approaches and methods.

Basic assumptions of science

Before embarking on scientific research properly so-called, it is necessary to fully understand

the assumptions that underlie the scientific process. These are at once assumptions as well as
prerequisites to scientific inquiry (Frankfort-Nachmias et al 2015).

The nature of the natural world: All science proceeds from a naturalistic point of view, that
is, a belief that there exists a natural, real-life, objective reality independent of the researcher.
Three assumptions proceed from this basic fact: One, that the natural world is discoverable, if
we only take the time to observe and study. Therefore by extension, the human beings that we
study in the social sciences, as part of nature, can also be understood. Two, that there are
certain regularly occurring patterns in nature that give order to the natural world, nothing is
ever out of place in nature, thus even social structures and human interactions as part of this
natural world display certain regularities that can be discovered and understood. Three, which
proceeds from both preceding points, is that all natural phenomena have causes. In other
words, every feature of the natural world that we can empirically observe has equally
empirically observable causes that account for their features. Therefore, science rejects non-
natural explanations for natural phenomena, and instead seeks natural causes for naturally

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occurring events and behaviours. Science does not make room for religion, superstition,
magic, and other non-natural causes of phenomena.

The practical application of these three prerequisites of science for the social scientist is that
s/he proceeds from the concurrent assumption that human behaviour is observable, displays
certain uniformities or regularities, and therefore can be explained because natural causes can
be discovered under study.

Nothing in the natural world is self-evident. Scientific claims must be objectively

demonstrated, and must be externally and objectively verified. Scepticism is an essential
collateral of scientific investigation.

Experience is the basis for knowledge. Only knowledge apprehended by the use of the five
human senses can be considered to exist as such knowledge can also be experienced by
others coming into contact with it, and does not depend on the say-so of any single person.
All science is empirical.

Knowledge has intrinsic worth. In and by itself, the pursuit of knowledge is an adequate goal
of research or other human inquiry. No other justification is needed for engaging in research
but the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake because science is based on the assumption that
ignorance is not an option if we must improve the conditions of living species (cf Frankfort-
Nachmias 2015: 6-8).

Purposes of Research

Why do we conduct social scientific research? Five possible purposes for conducting research
may be discerned from the literature, namely, exploration, description, understanding,
explanation and prediction. Some of these however may overlap, but each could be distinct
goals for specific types of researches.

Exploration: Research may be carried out for the purpose of investigating a little known
phenomenon in order to gather information about it. For example, one may wish to study the
emerging phenomenon of female suicide bombers in the Boko Haram insurgency, but given
the emergent nature of the phenomenon may be restricted to only feasible techniques and
tools as a way of first penetrating the problem. The motivation for exploratory research may
be mere curiosity, or it may be the desire to explore the field in order to plan a more directed
research effort and therefore the exploration supplies the needed starting point. Exploratory

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research often does not begin with clear hypotheses, but may be useful for arriving at
hypotheses which may then inform future research. Exploratory research is very useful for
opening up new grounds for social science inquiry.

Description: Descriptive research occupies an important place in social scientific research.

This kind of research is aimed at answering what, how, where, when questions in research,
and the key scientific tool for this is observation. Descriptive studies aim to collect facts
about a population or some aspect of social reality and to obtain explicit details pertaining to
specific characteristics that they exhibit. Thus, one may describe the demographic
characteristics of student union leaders in Nigeria, or attempt to gather information relating to
the proportion of households that profess specific political party affiliation in Lagos State,
Nigeria, and so on. Description provides the basis for other kinds of research that may then
proceed up the ladder of scientific research to use these facts for other inferences and to draw
other conclusions.

Understanding: The purpose of understanding seems self-evident, but needs to be separately

identified and reinforced as a key desirable outcome of social scientific research. Research
may go beyond description and apprehension of facts to deduce the relationship that exists
among these facts in order to cast light on specific social processes.

Explanation: Explanatory research is highly desired in scientific research because the

preceding purposes of research do not advance knowledge much until the data and
information gathered is related in such a logical manner as to identify the causes of social
phenomena. Explanatory research answers the crucial “Why” question which seeks to
provide the set of observable phenomena that can be identified as preceding or occurring
alongside or resulting from other phenomena being studied. Naturalistic science proceeds on
the assumption that all naturally occurring phenomena are caused, and explanatory research
provides the explanations that make this link explicit.

Prediction: Theoretically, this is the end of explanatory scientific research: that data gathered
may help us to not only see the causal relationships between variable phenomena but also
lead us towards that which is likely to occur in the future based on our logical propositions
that denote causes and effects. In other words, if our description and explanation lead us to
the set of phenomena A (known as independent variables) which create certain other
phenomena B (the dependent variable) which changes in response to A, then we are better
able to predict possible outcomes whenever and wherever else we see A occurring; we could

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safely predict that B would follow. Prediction is the explanation of future behaviour or
events.

Types of Research

One way to categorise the types of research would be by examining the purposes for which
the research is carried out. Two broad types can be identified on this basis: pure and applied
research. Pure or Basic Research is research executed for the simple purpose of discovery
and creating knowledge about a specific subject. This is the acquisition of knowledge for the
sake of knowledge itself. Basic research is concerned with the development of theories about
why and how events occur. Applied Research is more often the goal of social science
research, by which the study of society is designed to make distinct contributions to solving
specific social problems or providing models for the application of theory to practice.

Another schema for typifying research is dictated by the underlying philosophical

foundations for specific research. Ontology and epistemology are branches of philosophy
concerned with what and how we acquire knowledge. Methodology, specifically, is the
philosophical underpinnings of research methods, referring to the underlying logic and
philosophical positions that dictate the specific methods we choose. Methodology must never
be confused or used interchangeably with “methods.” Therefore, we can also identify types of
research based on the methodological positions that guide researchers: positivist and post-
positivist research (McNabb 2004: 15). Positivist research emanates from the naturalistic
view of science discussed above and produces quantitative research while post-positivist
research is a family of research including critical, interpretive, and hermeneutic traditions that
produce qualitative research.

The Research Process

We have established in previous sections that scientific research is distinguished from modes
of inquiry that rely on subjective personal experience, perceptions and tradition by its reliance
on rigorous methods. The research process is the means by which the stated goals of
scientific research may be achieved. This process is a never ending one because the end of
one researcher’s activity could be the take off point for another researcher; the end of one
research effort may be the emergence of new problems of study, or new hypotheses for
investigation. Therefore the research process is often depicted as a cyclical one. The steps
involved in the research process are identification of a problem, review of the literature,

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hypotheses construction, research design, collection of data, data analysis, generalisations,
theory testing/building. Figure 1 below summarizes the steps in the research process.

Figure 1: The Research Process

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The research problem: Scientific inquiry begins with the identification of a research problem
which is a question or issue that requires a response in the form of a structured scientific
inquiry (Frankfort-Nachmias 2015: 46). A research problem is an issue arising in the social
world from our casual or informed observation or from existing research which provokes one
to seek answers by engaging laid down processes for scientific research. All around us are
issues that beg political science research to investigate: why do rising cost of living and
progressively declining standards of living not result in widespread anti-government protests
in Nigeria? How do Nigerians perceive the effectiveness of anti-corruption institutions? What
accounts for the persistence of the circulation of certain elites in the Nigerian political space?
Why are educated Nigerians also the least active politically? These kinds of questions are the
beginning of the framing of a research problem which then must be subjected to other
processes in order to be successfully investigated. It is important that the research problem is
clearly stated, unambiguous and highly specific in order to produce usable findings and
generalizable conclusions. In addition, the problem must lend itself to empirical investigation,
and be answerable by appeal to evidence (Vadum and Rankin 1997)

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Review of the literature: This step is sometimes subsumed under the first, but it surely
deserves attention. Once a research problem is identified and selected from the universe of
possible social issues for research, the researcher must delve into the related literature, that is,
the body of research that already exists on the same issue or similar issues. This is important
not only in order to know more about the issue and gather all relevant information for
defining the problem more sharply but also in addition in order to confirm that the proposed
research problem has not been resolved by earlier studies. The researcher can thus avoid
duplicating an existing study, avoid a waste of effort, as well as identify the specific gap in
the literature that his own nascent research can fit into and the contribution it can make in that
discipline or research area (Tischler 1996). Furthermore, the review of literature helps the
researcher decide what perspective s/he will adopt in approaching the problem of study.
Therefore this stage is important in order to rule out frivolous research efforts as well as more
sharply define the research problem.

Hypotheses construction: The determination of hypotheses is also a part of the clear

delineation of a research problem, because when the research problem is clearly articulated
and unambiguous, the variables for investigation become obvious as well as the direction of
their interaction that the research problem suggests. Hypothesis may be derived from theory
or they may be the result of earlier research, and they get better refined as the research
progresses. A hypothesis is a tentative and testable statement of the relationship that exists
between empirical variables in a research. It is a proposition about the relationship between
dependent and independent variables. According to Carl Hempel (1966: 19), the hypothesis is
“whatever statement [that] is under test, no matter whether it purports to describe some
particular fact or event or to express a general law or some other, more complex proposition.”
In fact, “it is the hypothesis, the tentative answer to the research question itself that
determines which observations to make in a study” (Vadum and Rankin 1997: 9; Kneller
1978). It is the research hypothesis that is framed as a tentative answer to the research
question and which is tested against the null hypothesis which typically states that there is
no relationship between the independent and dependent variables. According to Frankfort
Nachmias et al (2015), research hypotheses must have four characteristics: they must be clear
with relevant variables conceptually and operationally defined; they must be specific about
the direction of relationship between the variables and specify time, space and units of
analysis; they must be empirically testable using available research methods, and; they must
be value-free, with the researcher declaring his biases early in the study.

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Research design: The research design is the general strategy for executing research on a
selected problem. It is the comprehensive plan that determines what variables to observe,
how to empirically measure and observe them, as well as the methods chosen and how they
are to be deployed towards the achievement of the objectives of the research. This plan
guides the refinement of hypotheses, the collection and analysis of data, as well as the
interpretation of the findings. The research design is determined by the purposes of the
research, that is, whether it is an exploratory, descriptive, explanatory or predictive study.
The major determinant of the research design is the type of research questions asked, and the
best path to achieving valid conclusions in answering the research questions. The research
design must not be confused with the research methods which form only one aspect of the
research design. Generally, quantitative designs include surveys, longitudinal studies, cross-
sectional studies and experiments, while qualitative designs include ethnographic studies,
action research, grounded theory, and so on (McNabb 2004). Specific designs are discussed
in detail elsewhere in this book.

Data Collection: This stage in the research process entails a range of activities including the
determination of the sampling technique and the sample size, validation of research
instruments, reliability tests and any pilot studies, empirical observation involving data
gathering using the methods selected for answering the research questions, and any other
related activities. These methods may include the administration of questionnaires,
conducting interviews and focus group discussions, participant or non-participant
observation, archival research, review and cataloguing of published documents, case studies,
life histories, and various other methods. Data must be collected in a manner that does not
vitiate the scientific basis for research, and the researcher must especially avoid researcher
bias.

Data Analysis: This important aspect of the research process entails the use of appropriate
techniques for organising the data collected. Data collected from field work has no meaning
by itself unless it is processed and organised into meaningful categories. Data analysis is the
“process through which large and complicated collections of scientific data are organised so
that comparisons can be made and conclusions drawn” (Tischler 1996: 48). The specific
methods or analysing data will depend on the type of research questions and hypotheses and
whether the research is quantitative or qualitative. Conclusions may be drawn after the data
has been organised and summarised.

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Generalisations: For social scientific research, the end stage of the research process is the
application of the findings of the study to the understanding or explanation of a broader
reality. Generalisation is however limited by the type of research design employed and the
methods of data collection. Ultimately, new hypotheses are derived from generalisation
which then informs new researches that seek to pursue the new questions or relationships
inferred.

Research Ethics

Science without conscience is the death of the soul. – Francois Rabelais

Experimentation was originally sanctioned by natural science. There it is

performed on inanimate objects and raises no moral problems. But as soon as
animate, feeling beings become the subjects of experiment, … this innocence
of the search for knowledge is lost and questions of conscience arise. – Hans
Jonas (in Vadum and Rankin 1997: 156)

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that studies the basis for judgements of right and wrong
conduct, the morality of human action. There are ethical principles and rules that guide every
area of human endeavour, deriving from the accepted norms of right doing and thinking in
that field, and with social scientific research focused on human subjects, it becomes pertinent
to explore the subject of ethics to preserve human dignity in research participation. The study
of ethics of research became also necessarily embedded in research courses in the wake of the
discovery of several violations of acceptable ways of conducting research including
falsification and fabrication of data, exploitation and endangerment of research subjects, theft
of ideas and of written material, and various associated practices. One of the most widely
known and cited violations are those associated with the Nazi experiments on human subjects
who were incarcerated in the concentration camps and subjected to dangerous, debilitating,
painful and life-threatening experiments. Another often cited study which drew widespread
condemnation was the Tuskegee Syphilis study carried out on blacks in Macon County over a
period of forty years which denied them access to up-to-date treatments for syphilis because
the researchers wanted to chronicle the progression of the disease in human beings. The
research was funded by the US Centres for Disease Control, a government institution.
President Clinton in 1997 eventually issued an official apology to the families of the persons
who were mistreated in that study.

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According to McNabb (2004: 55), research ethics refers to “the application of moral
standards to decisions made in planning, conducting, and reporting the results of research
studies.” Various authors distinguish between ethical principles or standards on the one hand,
and ethical rules or conduct on the other. Ethical principles are the moral standards and
guiding rules entrenched in society pertaining to acceptable behaviour. Ethical conduct refers
to the specific actions rooted in ethical principles that make those actions acceptable. I will
discuss research ethics with respect to this dichotomy.

Ethical Principles in Research

I make reference here to the three ethical principles distilled in the Belmont Report, an output
of the US National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and
Behavioural Research which was set up by the US Congress in 1973 following a series of
scandals arising from unethical practices in research. The Belmont Report released in 1977
attempted to “identify the basic values behind ‘the many particular ethical prescriptions and
evaluations of human actions’ (National Commission, 1979, p. 3-4) in previous codes of
ethical conduct for research” (Vadum and Rankin 1997: 166), including the Nuremberg Code
developed after the Second World War. These are adapted and expanded in this section to
include broader notions that were latent and implicit in the Belmont Report.

Respect for Rights and Autonomy: This principle is based on the ethics of rights, which define
rights as privileges that individuals lay claim to primarily because they are human beings, and
secondly because these rights are normally legally guaranteed. The first consideration in the
application of research ethics should be that the subjects of our research in the social sciences
are living beings just as we ourselves, the researchers, are. This ethical principle appeals to a
common humanity by which the research subject is deserving of careful attention because
s/he bears rights that are inherent in the notion of being human and that therefore are
inalienable. The implication of this notion is that the individual is entirely a free and capable
agent – free to choose or deny participation in any research effort, and capable of making
decisions that s/he deems of benefit to her/himself. Even children have this right and
therefore can override the decision of an adult on their behalf if they do not want to
participate in a research. Furthermore, any measure taken by the researcher to mask a
research activity or to induce participation by bringing pressure to bear on people undermines
this ethical principle. Sambo (2005) points out, for example, that giving poor people large

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sums of money to induce their participation in research is a violation of the principle of
autonomy.

Beneficence: Mainly recognised as the “do-no-harm” principle, beneficence urges the

researcher to always ensure and secure the well-being of the research subjects and to steer
clear of any activities that will negatively impact the research participants. Beyond this,
beneficence includes ensuring that the researcher maximises the possible benefits and
minimises the potential harm to research participants. It needs to be noted again that the
fundamental principle of human rights here again is invoked as the benefit to the individual is
privileged over the potential benefit of a study for humanity in general.

Justice: This principle requires that research participants are treated with justice, that is, the
benefits and harm of any research are evenly distributed. People who have borne the risks of
research should also be entitled to the benefits that the research will accrue. For example, in
medical research, once the research yields some confirmed results that would relieve the
suffering of sick people, such a remedy should be made available to them.

Ethical Conduct

Deriving from the above principles must be the actual practice of ethical conduct by social
science researchers. The following are some such practices:

Voluntary Participation: No one should ever be forced to participate as subjects in a research

effort. Individuals must have a right to choose whether to be part of a research or not. No
form of duress must be brought to bear on intended research participants, and in a similar
manner the researcher must not take advantage of vulnerable populations by using them for
research without informing them that they are involved in a research project, or by going
through authority figures to compel their involvement. In unusual cases, research involving
the observation or collection of data about certain social processes may require that the
research is veiled from participants. In such cases the observance of the other ethical
principles and practices discussed here become even more urgent and important (Babbie
2008).

Do no harm: The researcher has the ethical responsibility to anticipate and remove any cause
for harm that may come to research participants by their involvement in a research project.
The harm may be physical, psychological or otherwise and may not be easily resolved even
after the conclusion of the project. The burden is upon the researcher to avoid such cases and

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if unavoidable, ensure that remedies are built into the research design. More importantly,
such research must only be engaged in if the benefits both to individuals and humanity
generally far outweigh the risks of harm. On no occasion, however, may one carry out any
kind of research that will result in the disability or death of the research participants.

Informed Consent: This has become a bedrock practice in social research and brings together
the other principles elaborated above. The best way to demonstrate respect for the autonomy
of proposed research subjects is to give them the power to give their consent to participate.
Even when the person is not deemed to have capacity to give consent, it is not left to the
discretion of the researcher to make this determination; even children must concurrently
concur with parents’ or guardians’ consent before being made to participate. Participants
must be given full and accurate information concerning the objectives, design and potential
risks and benefits of the study before their (usually written) consent is extracted. This also
must include the ability for research participants to decide not to continue mid-way into the
study. For persons incapable of making a decision themselves, the researcher must ensure
that they protect the participant from physical and mental suffering, and the possibility of
injury, disability or death.

Anonymity and Confidentiality: Earl Babbie (2008) urges an important distinction between
these two ethical requirements. Anonymity means that the respondents cannot be linked with
their responses in anyway, either by the researcher himself or by others reading the research
findings. Confidentiality implies that the researcher is able to identify specific respondents’
responses but takes the responsibility for not disclosing their personal information publicly or
beyond the immediate uses of analysing the data.

Veracity: The social science researcher must not hide information relating to her/his identity
as well as the purposes, funding, risks and benefits of the research being undertaken.
Deception is unethical practice, although under certain unique circumstances some
information may be temporarily withheld and then revealed to the participants at the end of
the research. This does not extricate the researcher from the other ethical requirements above,
especially the do-no-harm principle.

Professional fidelity: Researchers must maintain professional fidelity by ensuring rigour and
avoiding deceit in the handling and reporting of data. Data must not be manipulated during
analysis nor findings distorted in the research report. Researchers have professional ethical
responsibility to also disclose the limitations and delimitations of their study and not make

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claims about the data that are not tenable. Honesty is a basic ethical requirement of all
professions. Ultimately, frivolous research which does not have any practical significance or
is of minimal real-world relevance is unethical and exploitative, and must be shunned.

Plagiarism: This is not an ethical rule, but rather an ethical breach that must be avoided by all
means. Plagiarism is considered the highest academic crime and many students and scholars
have lost their place due to their involvement in this heinous act. Plagiarism is the
unauthorised and unacknowledged use of another scholar’s ideas and material. Whenever we
use other literature in our research, we must rigorously and scrupulously ensure that we
acknowledge the source both in-text and in end-of-chapter reference lists. Ideas borrowed
from other scholars must be presented as such and not passed off as if they originated from
us. Words used by other scholars must be inserted in quotation marks if we must use them in
our own research report, and when we paraphrase, we must also acknowledge the source. The
extreme form of plagiarism is the attempt to steal whole papers, articles, projects, patents,
speeches, theses and so on – practices which have been helped by the information revolution
which puts millions of papers at our reach through the mere stroke of our computer keys.
Plagiarism violates the principles of respect, honesty, veracity, and professional fidelity that
are expected of ethical research and researchers.

Chapter Summary

This chapter has discussed the basics and dynamics of taking the study of politics out of the
library into the real world, as advocated by the early proponents of the behavioural
movement. The core concepts relating to research have been systematically explained (see
Table 1 below) and the rules guiding this process have also been enunciated and must always
be kept sacrosanct. This has been a very simple introduction, but the following chapters
elaborate on many of the themes introduced in this chapter and help to show the way for
researchers embarking on the sometimes terrifying, but always rewarding journey of
scientific research and discovery.

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Table 1: Summary of Research Concepts in Chapter 1

Know Fact Experience Tradition

Authority A priori knowledge A posteriori knowledge Common sense
Empirical Science Epistemology Scientific
methodology
Research Data Observation Exploration
Description Understanding Explanation Prediction
Dependent variables Independent variables Pure research Applied research
Ontology Epistemology Methodology Positivist
Post-Positivist Quantitative research Qualitative research Research process
Hypotheses Research hypotheses Null hypotheses Research design
Ethics Research ethics Ethical principles Ethical conduct
Respect Autonomy Beneficence Do no harm
Justice Voluntary Informed consent Anonymity
participation
Confidentiality Veracity Professional fidelity Plagiarism

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