One of the basic ethical concerns in research with humans involves the inherent power differential between the researcher and the research participant. This differential occurs because the researcher has higher status than the participant and thus is able (and indeed expected) to control the participant’s behavior and also how the data contributed are used. The experimenter tells the participant what to do and when to do it and also determines whether the participant receives course credit or payment for participation. Although, as we will discuss in the next section, ethical procedures require that the participant always have the option to choose not to participate in the research and to withdraw his or her data, the high-status researcher may be infl uential in preventing him or her from doing so.1
Avoiding Abuses of Power
The fact that the researcher has power over the participant places the researcher in a position in which there is the possibility for abuse of this power. Such abuse might range from showing up late to the research session without apology, to promising the participant money for participation that is not actually available, or even to hypnotizing the participant and attempting to learn intimate details about his or her life without the participant’s knowledge. Any time the research participant is coerced into performing a behavior that he or she later regrets, the power relationship between the researcher and the participant has been misused. The inherent power differential between researcher and participant demands that the former continually and carefully ensure that all research participants have been treated fairly and respectfully.
Respecting Participants’ Privacy
One potential source of ethical concern in behavioral research, which stems from the control the researcher has over the use of the participant’s data, involves the invasion of the privacy of the research participants or violations of the confi dentiality of the data that they contribute. The private lives of research participants may be invaded in fi eld research when, for instance, the researcher searches through the garbage in a neighborhood or observes behavior in a public setting such as in a small town. These issues become particularly problematic when the research results are later published in a manner in which the identities of the individuals might be discovered. As a result, scientists often use fi ctitious names of persons and places in their research reports.
The privacy of research participants may also be violated in questionnaire and laboratory studies. In many cases, respecting the privacy of participants is not a major problem because the data are not that personally revealing. Exceptions may occur when the questionnaires involve intimate personal information such as sexual behavior or alcohol and drug use. In such cases the data should be kept anonymous. The respondent does not put any identifying information onto the questionnaire, and therefore the researcher cannot tell which participant contributed the data. To help ensure that the data are anonymous, individuals can seal their questionnaires in an envelope and place them with other sealed envelopes in a box. (As we will see in later chapters, making the data anonymous may also lead the respondents to answer questions more honestly.)
In other cases, the data cannot be anonymous because the researcher needs to keep track of which respondent contributed the data. This holds true when questionnaires are given to the same people at more than one time point or when participants are selected on the basis of their questionnaires for follow-up research. Here, the solution that respects the privacy of the individual is to keep the data confidential. One technique is to have each participant use a unique code number to identify her or his data, such as the last four digits of the social security number. In this way, the researcher can keep track of which person completed which questionnaire, but others will not be able to connect the data with the individual who contributed it. In all cases, collected data that have any identifying information must be kept in locked rooms or storage cabinets to ensure confi dentiality, and the researcher must be aware of the potential for abuse of such information. Because many data are now stored on computer disks, the researcher must be especially careful that no copies of these data are in the public domain, such as stored on public-access computer networks.
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