
Unit 4: Ethics
Respect for the autonomy and dignity of persons: continued
Researchers should respect the
knowledge, insight, experience and expertise of participants and
potential participants. They should also respect individual, cultural and role
differences.
Researchers should avoid any unfair, prejudiced or
discriminatory practice, for example in participant selection or in the
content of the research itself.
Researchers should respect the privacy of individuals, and ensure
that they are not personally identifiable, apart from in exceptional
circumstances and then only with clear, unambiguous informed
consent. They should respect confidentiality, and ensure that
information or data collected about individuals are appropriately
anonymised and cannot be traced back to them,
even if the participants themselves are not troubled by a potential
loss of confidentiality. Where a participant wishes to have their voice
heard and their identity linked with this, researchers will try
to respect such a wish.
Good researchers will make sure that people’s rights are always respected.
Research ethics: Scientific value
Research should be designed, reviewed and conducted in a way that ensures its quality, integrity and contribution to the development of knowledge and understanding. Research that is poorly designed or conducted wastes resources and devalues the contribution of the participants. At worst it can lead to misleading information being published and can have the potential to cause harm.
Researchers should make sure that the scientific design of the research is of a sufficiently high standard and robustness. They should consider the potential risks of harm and protocols for addressing such difficulties (should they arise). It is important that the aims of the research are as transparent as possible to ensure that it is clear what the research intends to achieve.
SMILE - Ethics by The BPS code of human research ethics, The HPC guidance on conduct and ethics for students, modified by Marion Kelt Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.bps.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/code_of_human_research_ethics.pdf, http://www.hpc-uk.org/assets/documents/10002D1BGuidanceonconductandethicsforstudents.pdf, http://www.gcal.ac.uk/hr/policies/general/code_of_good_practice_in_research.doc, http://www.gcu.ac.uk/registry/secretariat/documents/EthicsBookletMarch2011asonwebsite.doc. .