CHAPTER 3

Ethical Issues in Social Science

Research

Copyright © 2021 W. W. Norton & Company

Ethical Dilemmas in Social Science Research

• Every step in the

research process and

every research method

has ethical implications.

Learning Objectives

• Identify the basic expectations of ethical social research.

• Understand the history of unethical research that shaped modern ethics

standards.

• Become familiarized with the Institutional Review Board system.

• Assess modern challenges to conducting ethical social research.

3.1 Three Ethical Dilemmas
Three Ethical Dilemmas (1 of 2)

• Facebook Study: Accessing data without permission

• Is it ethical to study people who believe that only their friends and the

friends of their friends can see their information?

• Gang Leader for a Day: Lying to drug dealers

• To write an ethnography of gangs and drug dealers in the projects of

Chicago’s South Side, Sudhir Venkatesh had to be a bystander to crimes

and deceive his research subjects about his true purposes.

Three Ethical Dilemmas (2 of 2)

• Human Terrain System: Military studies of local people

• Social scientists were embedded in combat units to study the local

people and explain cultural and social practices, beliefs, and behaviors

to military leaders.

• Is it ethical for social scientists to study civilians in wartime and

provide that information to the military?

3.2 Defining Research Ethics
Ethics

• Ethics is the moral system that determines whether actions are right or

wrong, good or bad.

• Research may have unforeseen consequences that harm individuals, or

damage social trust in the community or the public’s belief in the integrity

of scientific research.

• One does not have to be a bad or evil person to perform unethical research.
The Belmont Report of 1979

• The Belmont Report of 1979 was issued by the National Commission for the

Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research

(1979).

• It forms the foundation of our national system designed to protect humans

who take part in medical or social science research.

Principles of the Belmont Report

1. Respect is the principle that people are to be treated as autonomous agents

in research studies and that those with diminished autonomy receive

protection.

2. Beneficence is the principle that refers to the responsibility to do good and

to protect subjects from harm in a research study.

3. Justice is the principle that research must be conducted in a fair manner

with the potential risks and benefits distributed equally among participants.
Informed Consent

• The main mechanism for ensuring these ethical principles are kept is the

requirement of voluntary informed consent.

• Informed consent is the freedom to say yes or no to participating in a

research study once all the possible risks and benefits have been properly

explained.

• Informed consent can be given by signing a form or by agreeing orally.

Vulnerable Populations

• Informed consent also means that no one can be coerced or forced to take

part in a research project.

• It is unethical for power dynamics to be leveraged against vulnerable

populations to force them to participate in research.

• A vulnerable population is a group of people who cannot give informed

consent, including those who are underage or have diminished mental

capacity.
Privacy

• The respect principle requires that researchers protect individuals’ privacy

and confidentiality.

• Privacy is the control over the extent, timing, and circumstances of sharing

oneself with others.

• If research subjects share information because they trust a researcher, the

researcher must keep that information private.

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

• In the United States, institutional review boards (IRBs) ensure that research

adheres to all ethical principles.

• An institutional review board is a committee located at an institution

where research is done that is responsible for reviewing all research

involving human subjects, with the goal of protecting the human subjects

and preventing ethical violations in the research.

3.3 A Brief History of Ethical Problems
in Research
Experiments and Torture at Nazi Concentration Camps

• During World War II, the Nazis conducted horrible experiments on

concentration camp prisoners.

• Denying the humanity of the prisoners, doctors deliberately inflicted pain,

suffering, disease, and death on people in gruesome scientific experiments.

• Many of the perpetrators were later prosecuted as war criminals at trials in

Nuremberg, Germany.
Ethical Developments from the Nuremberg Trials

• The Nuremberg Code is a set of ethical principles for human subjects

research, including the requirement of informed consent, developed in the

wake of the Nuremberg Trials following World War II.

• A risk versus benefit analysis is an assessment in which the potential

harms to research subjects are weighed against the potential benefits of the

research.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, 1932–1972

• The U.S. Public Health Service conducted a long-term study of untreated

syphilis in 400 poor African American men.

• The men were not told that they were infected with the disease, causing

them deliberate harm.

• Even after antibiotics that could cure syphilis were discovered in the 1940s,

the men were neither informed of their health status nor treated.
The Wichita Jury Study, 1955

• Researchers in Wichita, Kansas, secretly taped jury deliberations to study

whether jurors were influenced by lawyers’ showmanship.

• Details about the study were discovered by the press, leading to public

outcry about the right to a fair trial.

• Congress passed a law barring the recording of jury deliberations in

response to this study’s ethical issues.

The Milgram Obedience Experiment, 1950s (1 of 2)

• Stanley Milgram wanted to study how ordinary people could commit

atrocities like the Nazis during World War II.

• He designed a study to evaluate whether individuals would follow the

instructions of authority figures even when they knew it was wrong.

• Participants were told that the study was about learning and were asked to

administer electric shocks whenever a “learner” gave an incorrect answer.

The Milgram Obedience Experiment, 1950s (2 of 2)

• The “learners” were really members of Milgram’s research team pretending

to feel pain.

• Participants became distressed at the idea of causing others pain.

• When they tried to stop, the experimenter told them, “the experiment must

continue.” Over half the participants completed the study.

Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971

• Zimbardo recruited 24 male undergraduates to be

“prisoners” and “guards” in a simulated prison.

• Participants signed informed consent forms warning

them that their civil rights could be violated if they

were assigned the role of “prisoner.”

• The study was stopped early when the “guards”

became cruel, sadistic, and violent.

The Tearoom Trade Study, 1970

• Laud Humphreys wanted to study “tearooms,” public bathrooms where men

went to have sex with other men.

• He observed the men’s behaviors while pretending to be their lookout in

case the police arrived.

• Humphreys then violated his subjects’ privacy by recording their license

plate numbers, traveling to their homes, and interviewing them without

revealing his identity.

3.4 The Institutional Review Board System
Legislating Ethics

• Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) were established by the U.S. National

Research Act of 1974 to protect human subjects against ethical violations in

research.

• Any institution that receives federal money for research must have an IRB.

• IRBs are comprised of committees that review and approve research

protocols before the research begins.

Human Subjects Research

• What constitutes research with human subjects?

• Does it include a historian conducting an oral history?

• What about a sociologist working with census data or other public

surveys that have been de-identified?

• This question is still under debate, and rules have changed over time.

• Human subjects research is any study of persons that is a systematic

investigation designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.

How the IRB Works

• A researcher submits a research protocol, and the proposed research is

reviewed either by the full IRB or by a subset of staff members.

• Research protocol is a description from the researcher of the intended

methods and procedures, target population and recruitment methods,

possible risks and benefits of the study, and major research questions.

• Expedited review is possible if certain criteria are met.

Expedited Review

• Expedited review is possible when:

• The research does not include vulnerable populations.

• The data are already collected and de-identified.

• The research does not touch on sensitive subjects that might cause

psychological or physical harm to subjects.

• The informed consent process is straightforward and well designed.

Assessing Risks and Benefits
• One challenging part of the IRB process is assessing possible risks.

• Possible harms in social research:

• Emotional or psychological turmoil

• Economic or social harm resulting from loss of privacy

• Legal risk if research uncovers or documents illegal activities

• These risks must be counterbalanced by the benefits of the study.

• Some potential risks and benefits of research can only be understood in

retrospect.
Controversy over IRBs (1 of 2)

• In recent years there has been a growing debate about whether IRBs have

overstepped their bounds and are suppressing social science research.

• Jack Katz argues there is a contradiction in the IRB’s role in reviewing

“muckraking research.”

• If the IRB is supposed to protect research subjects from harm, then what

about research that seeks to identify people who perhaps should be

exposed and prevented from harming those with less power?

Controversy over IRBs (2 of 2)

• Some also believe that IRBs legalize and bureaucratize ethical behavior in a

way that tricks researchers and subjects into thinking that ethical behavior

is “taken care of” before the research begins.

• Researchers should never believe they are free from making ethical

decisions just because they obtained permission to undertake a particular

study.
Professional Code of Ethics

• In addition to IRBs, professional organizations of researchers have

developed codes of ethics that govern their members’ behavior.

• The American Sociological Association (ASA) Code of Ethics specifies

sociologists’ many professional responsibilities to act ethically:

• In their relations with one another

• In their interactions with the public

• In their roles as teachers and supervisors of graduate students

3.5 Privacy and Confidentiality
Anonymity

• Anonymity is when no identifying information can be linked to

respondents and even the researcher cannot identify them.

• Anonymity may be ideal, but it is often not possible in social research.

Confidentiality

• In cases where anonymity cannot be maintained, the researcher has an

ethical responsibility to guarantee the confidentiality of the data.

• Confidentiality is when participants’ identifying information is only

accessible to the research team.

• But can promises of confidentiality always be kept?

Challenges to Maintaining Confidentiality (1 of 3)

• Sometimes, the ethical and legal requirement is to not maintain

confidentiality.

• In many states, researchers are required by law to alert the authorities

if they learn about child abuse or if the research subjects threaten to

harm themselves or others.

• For such situations, researchers must tell subjects that they are

required to report specific types of information.

Challenges to Maintaining Confidentiality (2 of 3)

• Researchers do not have the legal right to refuse to cooperate with law

enforcement in order to protect their research subjects.

• If a researcher learns about illegal behavior during a study, a court of

law can subpoena that information, and law enforcement can seize it

with a warrant.
Challenges to Maintaining Confidentiality (3 of 3)
• Social scientists can be called to testify in criminal or civil cases.

• Researchers risk contempt of court and jail time if they refuse the legal
system’s requests for the data about illegal activities.

• In 1988, Congress recognized this danger and passed a law allowing for the
issuing of certificates of confidentiality.

• A certificate of confidentiality is a certificate issued by the National

Institutes of Health that allows researchers to protect participants from
future requests for data disclosure.
The Challenges of Digital Data

• Digital data can be lost, stolen, or hacked.

• Email communications are not secure or private.

• It can be difficult to obtain informed consent and assess diminished

capacity online.

• If secure data transmission is not provided, research subjects need to be

told that “transfer of information across the internet is not secure and could

be observed by a third party.”

Deductive Disclosure

• Data disseminated to the social science community must be de-identified to

prevent deductive disclosure.

• Deductive disclosure is the use of unique combinations of variables to

identify specific individuals in data sets.

Suppression and Data Swapping

• The U.S. Census Bureau uses special techniques to protect the privacy of

Americans’ personal information.

• Suppression is a technique for ensuring confidentiality in which data are

simply not shown.

• Data swapping is a statistical technique for ensuring confidentiality in

which data on households that have been matched on a set of key variables

are swapped across blocks.

Differential Privacy

• In the leadup to the 2020 census, scientists at the Census Bureau

announced they would be using a new protective system developed by

cryptographers and computer scientists.

• Differential privacy is a method of protecting data that adds enough

statistical noise to a published table or statistic so that no individual can be

recognized in the data, thus protecting the privacy of every respondent.

Genetic Data and Confidentiality (1 of 2)

• Social researchers are increasingly interested in collecting biological data

from research subjects to understand gene-environment interactions.

• Care must be taken to explain to research subjects that the study of

biomarkers will not generate information about the role of specific genes in

people’s health or lives.

• For example, having a genetic marker for depression does not indicate that

an individual will become depressed.

Genetic Data and Confidentiality (2 of 2)

• Can genetic information collected during research be used to deny

individuals opportunities in the future?

• Will individuals with a genetic variant for an illness be denied health-

care coverage?

• Will individuals with a gene for cognitive disabilities experience a lack

of funding for educational opportunities?

• Can preemptive legal action be taken against individuals with a gene for
violent behavior?
3.6 Deception in Research
Avoiding Demand Characteristics

• Deception is relevant to many research methods, but it appears most often

in ethnographic and experimental research.

• For experiments, subjects are often not told the true purpose of the

experiment because that knowledge would contaminate the results.

• Demand characteristics is the process whereby research subjects, when

they become aware of a study’s hypothesis, behave in a way that confirms

that hypothesis.
Deception in Ethical Social Research (1 of 2)

• How does one design an ethical study if it involves deception?

• The ASA Code of Ethics allows deception only if there is no alternative way

to do the study, and only if the research involves no more than minimal risk

to the research subjects.

• The American Psychological Association (APA) says research subjects

should never be deceived about significant aspects of the study that would

affect their willingness to participate.

Deception in Ethical Social Research (2 of 2)

• Informed consent documents must never be part of the deception.

• General terms can be used to avoid revealing details about the study that

could influence participants’ behavior.

• When a study involves deception, subjects must be debriefed at the end of

their participation.

• Debriefing is the process of interviewing participants after the study and

then informing them of the actual purpose of the experiment.

Deception Online

• Online chatrooms, discussion forums, dating sites, and social networking

sites provide opportunities for researchers to discreetly join a closed group

or observe interactions without telling people they are being studied.

• The ethical rule for Internet research is that researchers cannot study

behavior that people reasonably expect to be private.

3.7 Scientific Misconduct
Conflicts of Interest

• Scientific findings are supposed to be free from bias, as scientists are

expected to work objectively to discover the truth.

• Conflicts of interest occur if researchers’ interests or loyalties compromise

the way they design, conduct, or report their research.

• Compensation should never depend on the outcome of the research.

• Unconscious bias is usually more of a risk than willful misconduct.

• Personal bias can affect the reporting of research results.

Minimizing Conflicts of Interest

• Ways for researchers to minimize conflicts of interest:

• Do not accept funding from sponsors with whom they have financial interests
or who expect a particular research outcome in exchange for their
sponsorship.

• Be transparent in publications about the sponsors of a study and any conflicts

of interest that might exist.

• Distinguish between objective findings and personal opinions when

disseminating the results of research.
Data Fabrication and Manipulation

• Sometimes data analysis is willfully biased; other times, researchers are blind
to their own selective interpretations.

• When researchers run a lot of different statistical models and choose to

report only those that come out as statistically significant, that is called
p-hacking.

• Ethnographers might pay a disproportionate amount of attention to the

rare examples of conflict in a research setting.

• Interviewers might select for eloquent or unusual quotes.

Research Integrity

• Social scientists have recently taken steps to reduce both intentional and

unintentional research misconduct.

• Scientific journals have moved quickly to retract articles that are based on

faulty science.

• But the best solution is to reduce the bias and misconduct before it affects

scientific results by promoting integrity in the research process.

The Move to “Open Science”

• Preregistration prevents the researcher from choosing models based on the

findings they desire.

• Increasingly, journals, funders, and professional organizations encourage or

require researchers to make all their data and computer code available to

other researchers.
Review Questions
Review Question 1

Which principle of the Belmont Report specifies that the benefits and risks of

research should be distributed equally across groups?

A. respect

B. beneficence

C. justice
Review Question 2

Which unethical study involved deceiving a group of poor African American

men about their health status?

A. Tuskegee Syphilis Study

B. Zimbardo Stanford Prison Experiment

C. The Wichita Jury Study

D. The Tearoom Trade Study

Review Question 3

Which organization is responsible for assessing whether the potential benefits

of proposed research outweigh its potential risks?

A. Nuremberg Tribune

B. Office of Protection for Research Subjects

C. Institutional Review Board

D. Census Bureau
Review Question 4

When researchers interview participants after a study and inform them of its

actual purpose, this is called

A. informed consent.

B. confidentiality.

C. suppression.

D. debriefing.
Review Question 5

A researcher’s political ideology could be considered a conflict of interest with

his or her research.

A. true

B. false
Review Question 6

When identifying information about participants in a research study is kept in a

secure, password-protected filed, these data are

A. anonymous.

B. confidential.
Review Question 7

Which is a step that researchers can take to minimize conflicts of interest?

A. not accepting funding from sponsors who expect a particular research outcome in

exchange for their sponsorship

B. being transparent about sources of funding and conflicts of interest in publications

C. distinguishing between objective findings and personal opinions when

disseminating findings

D. All of these are steps researchers can take to minimize conflicts of interest.
Discussion Questions
Discussion Questions

• Why were vulnerable populations repeatedly the subjects of the historical

unethical research covered in this chapter?

• Do you think the benefits of the Zimbardo Stanford Prison Experiment

outweigh the harm done to participants?

• How could the research design of the Milgram Obedience Study have been

altered to minimize the risk of harm to participants?

Credits
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