ARAŞTIRMA YÖNTEMLERİ

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Utilitarianism can refer to “A field of study, concerned with investigating what is good or right and how we should determine this. On this interpretation, ‘social research ethics’ means the study of what researchers ought and ought not to do, and how this should be decided. There are different theoretical frameworks about research ethics. Deontology is an ethical perspective that judges researchers’ actions according to some absolute/universal duties requiring certain types of action. Consequentialism is an ethical perspective that evaluates researchers’ actions according to their consequences. Utilitarianism is an ethical perspective that judges actions of researchers according to which they produce most happiness and/or utility for the participants. Epistemology and aesthetics are not related to research ethics.

Research ethics is basically about means of ensuring that vulnerable people are protected from exploitation and other forms of harm. One of the most important aims of research ethics is to protect participants from all kinds of risks.

The phenomenon of “research ethics” was mostly resulted from the revelations regarding the appalling medical experiments conducted by some Nazi doctors in German concentration camps during the World War II. For example, they “killed Gypsy twin teenagers in order to determine why some of them had differently colored eyes. Prisoners of war were forced to drink seawater in order to find out how long a man might survive without fresh water.” As a result of such experiments, firstly, the Nuremberg Code of 1947 was developed to outline some basic ethical principles (e.g., informed consent, avoiding harm, respecting privacy) that were anticipated to guide medical experiments. The Nuremberg Code is the most important milestone in research ethics. Because the ethic codes developed in different areas of social sciences were based on the Nuremberg Code.

The Tearoom sex study was conducted by Laud Humphreys (1970; cited in Thomas, 1996) and still continues to illustrate controversial ethical issues of deception, informed consent, and invasion of privacy. The Zimbardo Prison Experiment was criticized for not informing participants about the risk of psychological stress, physical discomfort, and/or humiliation to which they were ultimately exposed. The most widely held criticism of the Tuskegee study centers on the absence of informed consent and the exploitation of the participants. The Milgram obedience experiments were conducted to investigate people’s obedience to authority; in other words, the aim was to see how far a person would be willing to harm another person. However, the research participants were deceived about the nature of the research and led to believe that they were administering electric shocks to other participants. In The Little Albert Experiment an 11-month-old infant (named Albert B.), without the knowledge or consent of his parents, was conditioned to fear rats by associating them with fear-inducing circumstances such as a loud noise.

Principle-based ethics, developed by Beauchamp and Childress (2000; cited in European Commission, 2010; Schüklenk, 2005), proposes a system of ethical reasoning based on the following four principles:

A virtue is defined as a trait of character which is manifested in the habitual action of a person and believed to be good for the person to have. Virtue ethics, then, refers to a researcher’s possession of certain traits/virtues as part of his/her character/personality such as being kind, generous, courageous, just, and prudent, etc. Indeed, “The essence of virtue ethics is that character is the primary object of ethical appraisal, and actions are judged according to what they tell us about the agent’s character.”

There is almost a universal agreement that informed consent is of the most important ethical principle in research ethics. By way of informed consent, the prospective research participant comes to an understanding of the goals of a research and of what participation in it would involve so that he/she can make his or her own free decision about whether, and under what conditions, to participate. In order for informed consent to be considered valid it must meet at least the following three criteria:

European Commission (2010, p. 78) defines “privacy” as the protection of “control over information about oneself; control over access to oneself, both physical and mental; and control over one’s ability to make important decisions about family and lifestyle in order to be self-expressive and to develop varied relationships.” Privacy is also related to the issue of protecting both personal territory and information. Anonymity and confidentiality are the two strategies used to maintain/protect privacy. Confidentiality is the obligation of the researcher not to reveal information about a research participant without his/her permission. Anonymity is the condition of being anonymous as a participant in the research, or the removal of reference to a research participant from whom the information is gathered.

Ethical issues are likely to arise in all kinds of social research. There are four broad issues that can produce ethical dilemmas for all researchers:

The essence of reflexivity in qualitative research is, then, related to “a process of critical reflection both on the kind of knowledge produced from research and how that knowledge is generated”. Because qualitative research is primarily a shared activity of knowledge construction (that is, together the researcher and the participants are engaged in an active process of producing knowledge), it requires the researcher to not only report the “facts” of his/her research, but also actively construct interpretations (e.g., “What do I know?”) while at the same time questioning how the interpretations have been made (e.g., “How do I know what I know?”) as well to request from his/her participants to reflect on their experiences.