Ethics and Research

Most of the time we spent discussing research ethics had to do with how we treat study participants. We did talk a little bit about how to conduct a study ethically, in terms of how we work with individuals and people. This seems critical to me because qualitative research is so focused on relationships between people. Relationships between researchers, between researchers and participants, and between researchers and readers/reviewers. I think one ethical issue that has not been discussed enough is the ethics of the researcher when using technology to collect data.

Last semester I took LTEC 6511, a research methods class. In order to complete the assignments we had to create a research instrument and collect study data in order to perform quantitative analysis on the data. Since this was an informal study, I used informal channels to collect data. I contacted teachers at the school where my wife teaches, I contacted family members, I used Facebook, etc. to shake all the trees that I could to collect survey responses. In the end I got 44 responses, the bare minimum for my instrument. I can tell you that the temptation to spam my Google Form with bogus responses in order to boost the number of responses in the data set was real. In the end, I managed to work with the small sample size, but it makes me wonder how often researchers, who are under a lot of pressure to get grants and publish in order to receive some sort of job security, find themselves padding their data. I hope it doesn’t happen often, but with technology today, I’m certain that the possibility exists.

In a similar way, Ph.D. students, such as myself, might be tempted to short-cut a literature review. Online databases have made literature reviews so much more efficient that it isn’t unlikely that a review search might return more results than a student researcher could possibly use. A Ph.D. student is expected to be an expert on existing research related to his or her dissertation, so what is to stop a student from padding the lit review, as well? Use sources that may not be good primary sources, but adding them to inflate the references section.

The truth is that we all live in the Information Age and most research is now conducted, in all or in significant part, within the context of technology. So much so that there is an ethical subdomain specifically for Information Technology (McCarthy et al., 2005).

I guess I feel like technology has made some parts of research very easy in the sense that a person can do so much of the work online. If plagiarism is a problem in academics, then I assume that unethical researchers might also find other ways to take short-cuts in their work in order to speed results or to inflate findings. I see this as an ethical problem that would be hard to catch given the sheer volume of available data.

Another technology issue that has ethical implications, especially in regards to online or distributed learning, is access to adequate technology. The digital divide is real. If a researcher “assumes” all study participants have equal access to the resources under study, then the researcher may be placing participants in an ethical dilemma. I think this would be apparent particularly in studies that use primary school students. A student who doesn’t have access to the internet at home, or who doesn’t have a computer that works well enough to complete the study requirements, may be looked down upon by peers, or may find a way to falsify data in order to avoid bringing attention to the lack of technological resources.

Ultimately, there is no way to be 100% cheat-proof. People who behave unethically will probably continue to behave that way. However, as a researcher I think the risk of ethical dilemmas may be mitigated by sound research design and by ensuring that one or more other researchers are working together and cross-checking data. Awareness of the possibility of ethical conflicts is also a way to mitigate the potential, and many possibilities can be pre-identified while working on the conceptual framework for the study. Integrating an ethical framework that includes consideration for the ethics of Information Technology in a research study would be ideal (Laudon, 1995). Ultimately, being aware that technology can be abused and planning to keep all research acts above reproach is the best way to mitigate the risk of ethical challenges in a study.

Laudon, K. C. (1995). Ethical Concepts and Information Technology. Communication of the ACM, 38(12), 33-39.

McCarthy, R. V., Halawi, L., & Aronson, J. E. (2005). Information Technology Ethics: A Research Framework. Information Technology Ethics, 2, 7.