Chapter 3: Ethics: Privacy, Consent, Avoid Conflict
(F) Day of the week: Tuesday Class: IS303 Created Time: November 3, 2020 10:29 AM Database: Class Notes Database Date: November 3, 2020 10:29 AM Days Till Date: Passed Last Edited Time: June 9, 2021 10:42 AM Type: Reading Notes
Research ethics is to gain the trust and respect from the research participants and the public.
Unethical research could undermine trust in science and other scientific institutions as well.
Types of unethical research practice
- Falsifying Data
- Safeguarding the wellbeing of research subjects
- Obtaining informed consent from subjects
- Protecting participants privacy
- Avoiding conflicts of interests
What is Ethics?
Ethics is the use of moral principles to distinguish between what is the moral right and wrong morally good or bad, Ethics doesn’t look to laws to distinguish between good or bad.
Ethics is decided by your conscience, the power of rational thinking, common sense
- Responsibility
- Innocence
- Compassion/Empathy
How to practice ethics
- Know the good
- Grow good actions
- Protect the good
- Fight the bad
1. Putting Ethics in Historical Context
- WWII Nazi Germany’s Concentration Camps had unethical research experiments on prisoners of war.
- Canada did nutritional research on aboriginal people for extended time
- 1959 pharmaceutical paid physicians to test their drugs on patients
- Federal funded physicians injected cancer cells into elderly without consent
- U.S. Denied 400 syphilis inflected black men penicillin
- 1940s U.S. fed radioactive oatmeal to retarded school patients
Even social science must be planed and conducted with ethical rule of conducts in mind (Nuremberg Code)
2. Research Should Not Cause Harm to Subjects
Causing No Harm Principle proposed the Nuremberg trail that base it’s procedures on The Nuremberg Principle that dictates on what to do with war crime prisoners ??
The ‘cause no harm’ rule have problems that researchers might not able to predict the result to know the consequence
Experiments could have unintended results or effects that couldn’t be calculated as it’s not been done before.
3. Researchers Should Obtain the Informed Consents of Subjects
Informed Consent: research participant must know everything about the research that might affect their decision in participating.
All federally funded research projects require Informed Consent
Four Elements of Informed Consent
3.1 The Assumption of Competence
Informed consent can only be given by an individual who is or in a state fit to decide what is best for them.
Research often require subjects who are immature, irresponsible, or incompetent in decision making.
⇒ Consent must come from parents or guardian of children or the mentally challenged
Informed consent must not only be through lip-service, but also through written forms
The “Passive” or “opt-out” consent forms:
- To reject you must reply back with a rejection message
- This means there is higher rates of participants as they might forget or its a hassle
Weakness
- The difficulty in defining and drawing the line between competence and not.
3.2. Voluntarism
Informed Consent can only be given by individuals who are truly free to say yes or no to the research.
They are not forced against their will to participate
- A school cannot only accept students if they must participate as a subject in a research
- Poor people cannot say no to offer of money for participation
Weakness
- Some people are in desperate for money or compensation could have no other option than to participate in the research
3.3. Full Information
Informed Consent can only be given when the participant is given all the relevant information that might affect their decision in participating.
Weakness
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How much info is relevant? Will it confuse the participants?
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However some studies need subjects to not know the objective to be effective
Reactivity Effect subjects change their behavior after knowing they are being watched/measured
The toss-up between Validity & Ethics
3.4. Comprehension
Inform Consent can only be given if the participant is able to understand the information received.
Consent document should be written as a Teaching tool rather than a Legal document
- Participants must be given time to think over and discuss with others before deciding
Weakness
- Simplifying research terms could result in misinformation or insufficient details of the research
4. Researchers Should Respect Participants’ Privacy
Right of Privacy: is the ability to control when and what conditions that others have access to our information.
In 2013 UNGA passed a resolution including a “and international right to privacy”
Researchers must also look about for privacy violations in their research/survey procedures
4.1. Sensitivity of Information
Safeguards must be put in place to protect the privacy and the information provided by the participants
Information that might be embarrassing or personal
4.2. Research Settings
Research locations must be treated with respect to people’s privacy even in public areas
Personal cars, beach spots, public restrooms are private areas
4.3. Disseminating Research Findings
Researchers will offer protection of privacy by guaranteeing anonymity or confidentiality to participants
How?
- Collection of data is done so researchers cannot link info to individuals
- Omit self-identifying info in data collection
In anonymity, researchers are not able to know what information link to specific individuals, therefore, they cannot violate privacy in the first place
In confidentiality, researchers are able to know the linkage between info and individuals but promise to not release it to the public.
Sometimes however, anonymity and confidentiality doesn’t guarantee privacy, individuals could be identified by how specific and personal questions are answered.
Certificate of Confidentiality: a form obtained from the National Institute of Health to protect against forced disclosure of confidential research information.
5. Researchers should Avoid Conflicts of Interest
Researchers/Scientific community could come to conflict with it’s corporates funders
Corporate funders might say they own the research finding which goes against “research should be a public endeavor”
Why corporate do so?
- To gain competitive edge over rivals
- To keep negatively impacting information from the public
Institutional Review Boards is who sets the initial agreement of ownership of research findings to avoid conflicts between the researcher and the funder.
Corporate sponsorship could also influence the findings obtained.
- Experiments funded by for-profit orgs. were more likely to have positive results
- Experiments funded by non-profit orgs. were more likely to have negative results
Therefore, to avoid misinformation, researchers should make their biases known for readers to keep that in mind for the paper.
Reinforcing the Ethical Route: Institutional Review Board
Institutional Review Board: body to reinforce the ethical behavior of researchers in their treatment of subjects and their findings.
All U.S. institutions that does human research with funding from the federal government must have their own IRBs
However, the IRBs can also make mistakes in accepting unethical projects
Discussion
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What is ethics?
Ethics is the use of moral principles to distinguish between what is the moral right and wrong morally good or bad, Ethics doesn’t look to laws to distinguish between good or bad.
Ethics is decided by your conscience, the power of rational thinking, common sense
- Responsibility
- Innocence
- Compassion/Empathy
-
Why is Ethics important for research?
Because science is based on the principle of helping the general public. If the process of of researching is harmful or morally unethical to the public, it will be conflicting with its objective in the first place.
To protect it’s subjects or participants from harm or violation of privacy
Helps to foresee what are the possible ethical issue that might arise in the research project, to plan and avoid these issues before conducting the research.
- To maximize validity without compromising ethics
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