Textbooks typically focus on the ethical treatment of participants when discussing ethical issues in research. While participant
treatment is a central issue in research ethics, other ethical concerns -- often overlooked in textbooks -- are equally important to address. Let's assume research involves at
least four distinct stages:
- Literature review
- Generating new hypotheses
- Gathering data
- Testing and reporting hypotheses
Each of
these stages involves a number of ethical considerations. First, when
conducting a literature review, two common ethical issues are plagiarism and
failing to check primary citations. Plagiarism in any form is obviously
unethical. Researchers should strive to ensure that they are not falsely
misrepresenting others’ ideas as their own, and that they give appropriate
credit for ideas and prior findings to their originators. Similarly, when
generating new hypotheses, researchers should not “steal” others
research ideas.
A second
ethical consideration related to the literature review process is checking
primary sources. Often, researchers will find a citation in one of the sources
from which they are drawing information, and will simply cite that original
work as the author cited it without reading the original source. This
oversight has led to the false propagation of the idea that a cronbach’s alpha
of 0.7 (a measure of scale reliability) is acceptable, "according to" Nunnally and
Bernstein (1994). However, a careful reading of the original source reveals
that Nunnally and Bernstein (1994) actually espoused that:
“In the early stages of predictive or construct validation research, time and energy can be saved using instruments that have only modest reliability, e.g., .70. . . . In contrast to standards used to compare groups, a reliability of .80 may not be nearly high enough in making decisions about individuals. Group research is often concerned with the size of correlations and with mean differences among experimental treatments, for which a reliability of .80 is adequate. . . . If important decisions are made with respect to specific test scores, a reliability of .90 is the bare minimum, and a reliability of .95 should be considered the desirable standard” (pgs. 264-265).
At no point do Nunnally and Bernstein assert that a reliability of 0.7 is universally acceptable. As you might expect, it is
not uncommon for researchers to put a “spin” on others’ findings and theories
in order to better support their own research and logic. Proper investigation
of original sources is necessary for ethical, rigorous research and the correct
attribution of conclusions.
Third,
when gathering data, researchers must strive to protect participants from
psychological and physical harm. As you all hopefully already know, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) was
created to protect the rights of human research participants. Since the IRB is covered in depth in most research textbooks, we will not spend a great deal of time discussing its function here.
Finally,
when testing and reporting hypotheses, a number of ethical considerations are
salient, including honest reporting of decisions made during research
(including elimination of “outliers”), the analyses conducted, the findings,
and the limitations of the research. With respect to data cleaning, for
example, a great many subjective decisions are made concerning subject
selection and the removal of outliers. Any selective data analysis technique
should be fully disclosed in research reports, especially as outliers are
typically removed, and subjects selected for analysis, to maximize the chance
of supporting the researcher’s theory. Further, when analyzing data,
researchers are often taught not to “snoop” in their data (i.e., mining data for
significant results) after having testing their hypothesis of interest, as snooping in data results in inflated Type
I error. In other words, “significant” effects found during data snooping are
more likely to be due to chance than would be expected given the set alpha level, especially without any alpha controls.
However, since data collection involves a great deal of effort at the onset,
some may argue that “snooping” is actually an ethical imperative -- that
researchers should derive the most benefit from the efforts they invest in data
collection. If you ever do yield to the temptation of data snooping, anything you find should be verified
through replication of the research.
Other ethical issues arise in the reporting of research. One common ethical issue is the tendency to
make misleading and inaccurate claims of causality, due to the importance
ascribed to causal relationships in social science. Another ethical
consideration in reporting is the extent to which researchers claim that their results are generalizable. Many times, samples represent a limited sub-population rather than the entire population of interest, especially given psychology's reliance on student samples.
Researchers should be careful in generalizing beyond their sub-population, as
the phenomena under investigation may be unique to a certain group of individuals.
Additionally, within
the past several decades, a research technique known as meta-analysis has risen
to prominence. Meta-analysis involves the quantitative synthesis and review of
a body of literature on a given topic. According to some, meta-analysis is an ethical
imperative for researchers as it makes the best use of existing data and may
prevent unnecessary data from being collected. Rosenthal (1994) urges any
researcher considering resolving a “controversy” in the literature to first
conduct a meta-analysis to determine whether or not there truly is a
controversy to resolve. However, while meta-analysis is a powerful technique
and possibly an ethical imperative, it is not the panacea that some scholars
assume it to be. Notably, meta-analysis involves a number of subjective
decision points (e.g., definition of phenomena, what literature to include,
including unpublished studies, measures accepted/collected, etc.). Consequently, two
meta-analyses conducted on the same topic may result in different conclusions.
Finally,
with respect to publication, Rosenthal (1994) highlights two additional considerations.
The first is the general ethical obligation of researchers to share findings, either
through publications, presentations, or citation of unpublished data. Rosenthal
(1994) holds that censoring findings is unethical due to the time investment of
the participants and researchers in obtaining data in the first place. The
second ethical obligation is to ensure that authorship is assigned according to
contribution, by some impartial ruling.
The
above discussion is not intended to provide a comprehensive summary of all of
the ethical issues involved in research – of which there are a great many.
Instead, this discussion is intended only to provide an overview of some of the
salient ethical issues throughout all stages of the research process. For additional reading on science and ethics, we recommend you read Rosenthal (1994).
References
Nunnally, J. C. & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric Theory (Third Edition). NY: McGraw-Hill.
Rosenthal, R. (1994). Science and ethics in conducting, analyzing, and reporting psychological research. Psychological Science, 5, 127-134.
