The Ethics Assignment– Individual Assignment
When conducting a research, it is important for the researcher to consider the ethical concern in order to avoid any difficulty or challenges that might occur. While studying, it is identified that ethical concern is critical aspects in research. The first ethical concern is to promote the research aim in terms of truth, knowledge, and avoidance of error respectively (Christensen et al., 2011).
On the other side, the second ethical consideration is important as it also helps to promote the values which are essential for doing collaboration work as every research has to deal with cooperation and coordination among different individuals such as institutions, people in terms of discipline.
In addition, the third ethical concern also helps the researcher in building the public support for doing research efficiently because there are people who like to invest in project research which they trust the integrity and quality of research. Resnik (2011) also stated that the fourth ethical concern is important for the researcher in ensuring that they are accountable to the public.
This states that research will not misconduct or conflict of interest that a researcher needs to ensure a project is funded by the public money. The fifth ethical concern is important because of this help in promoting the variety of social and moral values like animal welfare, social responsibility, public health, and safety.
The ethical concern is important for any research project because ethical norms and standards are set to serve the research goals and also apply those norms to people who are conducting a scientific research. In simple words, ethical norms help or guide the researcher to follow a right direction and complete the overall research study efficiently and effectively (Bell, 2014).
These all ethical concern somewhere ensure the researcher to distinguish which is wrong or right respectively. In research, these ethical considerations are important as many professional associates and agents are also following codes and policies which draw an outline for the researcher to follow in terms of ethical behavior and code of conduct (Sekaran and Bougie, 2016).
These stated ethical consideration help in protecting the researcher from confidentiality and anonymity of subject respectively. However, for addressing the ethical consideration, Institution Review Board (IRB) have developed which help the researcher to ensure that any human rights are not violated and in research safety of human subjects.
While doing the research, the five types of harm that can be caused by the researcher involve psychological harm, physical harm, legal harm, economic harm, and social harm. In concern to this, in a research study, psychological harm is considered a situation under which participation may feel uncomfortable in terms of learning their reaction towards the situation which causes harm in form of depressed, embarrassed, shameful, and guilty and so on (Flick, 2015).
On the other side, physical harm is found in a research study, when any participation health is not well or in stable condition and that can increase the likelihood of injury. In this way, this injury is considered as the physical harm. In addition, the third harm is legal harm, as per this law, a research is not able to provide the protection to its participant’s confidences within a court of law as a layer.
If the researcher collects the information about the illegal behavior of an individual, it needs to apply for a certificate of confidentiality. In a similar manner, social harm is also determined as harm in the research. While researching, the researcher needs to consider the social situation as well as their functioning, else community can create the social risk for an individual.
Apart from this, economic harm is harm that can noticeable in different ways based on the research study (Livingstone and Smith, 2014). In this, if the researcher does not consider any kind of costs that the participant would have to bear in concern of participating in the research, he will have to face economic harm while competing for the research.
Answer4.
In order to prevent the above-mentioned harm, there are different ways that can help the researcher to complete the research without facing any kind of issue. In this concern, the researcher can adopt a number of ethical principles which must be adopted by the researcher when performing the undergraduate or master’s dissertation research (Hoffmann and Del Mar 2015).
These principles prescribe the way by which the researcher can reduce the harm and achieve the expected outcomes. These ethical principles are as follows:
- Get informed approval from the probable participants of research
- Minimize the risk of harm for the participants
- Provide the protection of their anonymity as well as confidentiality
- Avoid using deceptive practices
- Provide the rights to the participants to withdraw from the research.
Thus, these are the important principles that help the researcher to complete the research with all the codes of ethics that are provided to be followed by the researcher so that any kind of fraud, misunderstanding and unethical practice cannot take place (Coombs, 2015).
Answer5.
- In above mentioned ethical concern, the one important concern is to promote the research aim on the basis of truth, knowledge, and avoidance of error respectively. Because of this concern, the researcher can complete the research and get reliable and trustable outcomes (Vitak et al., 2016). If the researcher, ignore this concern, it is more difficult for him to achieve the research objectives and provide the effective and efficient results to its report’s readers.
- In order to eliminate the risk related to ethical concern, the researcher can use the efficient and correct data while completing the research so that the associated risk with an ethical concern can be eliminated. If this risk is not reduced, it can create a major impact on the research due to which the research outcome will be affected.
- Other ethical concerns that are not relevant to the current research study are honesty and integrity, objectivity, carefulness, openness and respect for intellectual property etc. These are the other ethical concerns that are not relevant to the study but at the same time, they are needed to be concentrated by the researcher so that the other objectives instead of research can be achieved (Grady, 2017).
- As per psychological harm, within the research, participants feel more stress due to participation in the research study. They also feel pressure due to overwork. The physical harm is not applicable to this research as there is no candidate who is facing injury because of this research study and its practices. Apart from this, legal harm is the deeply related to the research as the researcher is not able to protect the participant’s confidentiality that is why he has to face legal issues within the research (Hair Jr et al., 2015). The social risk is not associated with this research because there is no important information about the participants that can impact the community so in this case, the researcher is free from social At the same time, there is another harm that is economic harm and it impacts the research study as in the research, several issues are found related to costs such as traveling costs, food costs, and so on.
Reference
Bell, J., 2014. Doing Your Research Project: A guide for first-time researchers. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).
Christensen, L.B., Johnson, B., Turner, L.A. and Christensen, L.B., 2011. Research methods, design, and analysis.
Coombs, W.T., 2015. The value of communication during a crisis: Insights from strategic communication research. Business Horizons, 58(2), pp.141-148.
Flick, U., 2015. Introducing research methodology: A beginner’s guide to doing a research project. USA: Sage.
Grady, C., 2017. Ethical principles in clinical research. In Principles and Practice of Clinical Research (Fourth Edition)(pp. 19-31).
Hair Jr, J.F., Wolfinbarger, M., Money, A.H., Samouel, P. and Page, M.J., 2015. Essentials of business research methods. UK: Routledge.
Hoffmann, T.C. and Del Mar, C., 2015. Patients’ expectations of the benefits and harms of treatments, screening, and tests: a systematic review. JAMA internal medicine, 175(2), pp.274-286.
Livingstone, S. and Smith, P.K., 2014. Annual research review: Harms experienced by child users of online and mobile technologies: The nature, prevalence and management of sexual and aggressive risks in the digital age. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 55(6), pp.635-654.
Resnik, D.B., 2011. What is ethics in research & why is it important. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, pp.1-10.
Sekaran, U. and Bougie, R., 2016. Research methods for business: A skill building approach. USA: John Wiley & Sons.
Vitak, J., Shilton, K. and Ashktorab, Z., 2016, February. Beyond the Belmont principles: Ethical challenges, practices, and beliefs in the online data research community. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 941-953). ACM.
