Ethics

Question 1

What is ethics in research?

Answer 1

Ethics in research is a set of guidelines to be followed. Research ethics touch on most aspects in science. Some of the general aspects are:

• The privacy and informed consent of participants. These might be sources of conflicts as the quality of the measurements may be impaired by following ethical guidelines.
• Professional issues such as faking data or altering designs to satisfy the sources funding the project are highly prevalent. In addition, ethics provide guidelines for the usage of other peoples work, e.g., plagiarism. You should give credit to contributors.
• Another ethical aspect is concerned with how conducted research may affect society, which is a hugely complicated topic.

Question 2

What are some of the most important aspects of voluntary participation

Answer 2

When regarding ethics and volunteers in an experiment, one of the keywords is informed consent. Participants should be informed on every aspect of the project such that they can make an informed decision regarding whether to participate or not. Researchers should also judge the competence of the participants to be informed. There are however situations where you cannot wholly inform the participants without affecting the outcome of the experiment. One method of getting around this issue is using a debrief where you inform the participants what the experiment was after the fact.

Question 3

What kinds of studies must be officially approved?

Answer 3

Whenever a study requires data that cannot be completely anonymous, there needs to be considerations regarding privacy and confidentiality. One example may a scenario in which we need to combine data from several sources. Here we need some sort of identifier or key to properly combine data. One example may be to retrieve background information from one place, and behavioral data from another. Surveys where the participants cannot be sufficiently anonymous must be approved by a governmental body before being allowed to initiate the data collection phase. NSD is the institution governing such in Norway and must be contacted when a study will process personal data.

Question 4

Can ethical considerations affect the quality of the data?

Answer 4

The quality of data can become an ethical issue whenever there are personal, political, or financial reasons motivating one or more of those involved in the research, and steps are not taken to assure the integrity of the data. Another possibility is whenever researchers knowingly fail to report problems with the data collection that may distort the interpretation of the results. Researchers should always be open and up front about their personal biases.