Such work is also pushing the policy makers to recognise the contribution of qualitative research findings. Thus, there are more researchers now trying to triangulate different methodologies in their research. The expansion of the number of institutions, individuals and methods in social health research naturally coincided with the increase in the kind of research topics being investigated. While the traditional areas of the health research, the general health surveys, the health seeking behaviour and disease perception studies, etc.
Another sensitive area finding the attention of researchers is that of family violence, the violence and its effect on the victims and survivors, behaviour of providers in situations of violence and so on. It is not possible to list all such areas of research, but it is sufficient to note that health has found connection with many more social issues and vice versa than it was done in the past in India.
Lastly, there is also an increased trend of sponsored research that is enmeshed in the above situation. In the past, the research at universities and academic institutions depended heavily on departmental and government sponsorship, with very few social science research projects being done with sponsorship of outside private organisations. But the decline in the official sponsorships gradually acted as the impetus for many departments to opt for outside support for research.
At the same time the sponsoring of research outside the university departments and institutions by the government and the foreign sponsoring agencies first brought many NGOs into health research. This opening has been enlarged by sponsoring agencies of all kinds by bringing in the for -profit marketing research and other private organisations. While the private for-profit marketing research organisations have made major inroads in successfully bidding for large health research projects from foreign donors and even government departments, other agencies like advertising firms, consultancy firms and individual consultants, etc.
Much of the research done by such organisations is not traditional academic research where in a classical way, global questions are posed and the information is used for building new theories or to modify existing ones. Much of such research is not published in scientific peer reviewed journals as it stays either as confidential reports to the sponsoring agencies or a few copies of their reports are published by the agencies for limited circulation. Such research is usually narrowly empirical and applied research, with little efforts at generalisation and for developing comprehensive understanding of the social health.
Added to this scenario is the increasing number of evaluation researches. While experimental social health research in terms of demonstration projects or action research, is considerably old in India, intervention research with the pointed objective of bringing about desired social change in relation to health and health care is an emerging area of multidisciplinary research enterprise.
Problems of proliferation The multi-dimensional proliferation has created a double impact on social science research. Firstly, it provided some visibility to health research in the social sciences as well as in biomedical disciplines. This was due to the sheer volume and the rapid increase of such social science health research.
Secondly, it made many ethical problems in social science health research more visible. Many health professionals who entered social science health research brought their concerns of professional ethics to this field.
The highly applied nature of research made ethical concerns more prominent than it was in pure or theoretical research and at the same time, the entry of untrained individuals to social science produced controversies on some of the outputs of the research that were identified with the violation of ethics or rights of the participants. In fact, historically, the concern for research ethics appeared first in the empirical applied research than the conceptual or theoretical simply because the former tried to find immediate answers to the existing problem and was often undertaken in order to make an intervention or to recommend intervention s.
Over and above all such considerations, ethics has started becoming prominent, not only in research but also in other fields of health work simply because of the increasing impact of the human rights movement and the efforts to bring to public notice various malpractices of the professionals. This has effectively shattered the demigod image of health professionals, leading to questioning of their conduct more than ever in the past.
While societal gaze is sharply focusing on the conduct of health professionals and researchers, there is inadequate parallel development of regulatory or self-regulatory mechanisms to incorporate social concerns in research and to monitor the works of theirs. In fact, as compared to biomedical research, in the field of social science research in health, little effort has been made to evolve some consensus about how such mechanisms should address the ethical concerns and monitor the conduct of researchers and professionals.
The social science institutions are mostly devoid of any institutional mechanism to review and monitor research, and have not developed standards and tools to be used for such purpose.
On the other hand, under increasing public pressure and for reasons of its own, biomedical institutions are gradually trying to establish or activate the existing defunct institutional review and monitoring mechanism, but they lack conceptual tools to appreciate and review social science health research. Much of it is clubbed, often without giving serious thought, under the heading of "minimal harm" research.
Indeed, till recently, even within the field of biomedical research,the social harm and benefits were hardly considered important issues for discussion in the review of research proposals and the ethical guidelines did not attach adequate importance to them. As a consequence, the societal concerns and the regulatory or self-regulatory mechanisms were often at odds with each other, sometimes leading to open confrontation.
Assuming that good, socially relevant research undertaken for the betterment of people's lives is absolutely essential and that the researchers' job is to meet such a need, the issue of the ethical standards and mechanism for observance of ethics in research become highly relevant at the present in our country. The chief purpose of guidelines is to evolve ethical standards and methodology for resolving dilemmas. Social sciences, medicine and research in health Often most of the ethics guidelines for research focus on those research that involve human beings, and of late, also animals.
Many people thus get an impression that any research that does not directly involve human beings need not have ethical concerns, or ethics is not intrinsic to such research endeavour. For instance, very little is talked about the ethical issues while undertaking research in the physical sciences that deal with chemicals and things, the ethics becoming prominent only at the time of publication of findings of such research and at the time of application of the findings having effect on human and social lives, and the environment.
That is one of the reasons why the physical sciences do not have elaborate guidelines on ethics intrinsic to research but have guidelines only for their applied disciplines. However, this simplistic understanding is going through a profound change. The scientists who were involved in discovering the atom and how to split or fuse its components in laboratories using physical matter, also discovered to their dismay that the energy generated was used to destroy human beings, animals and the environment.
In recent times, the laboratory-based work in genetics using biological material brought out problems in ethics of even pure science not directly involving human beings and animals. Researchers from physical sciences involved in applying their science for inventing weapons to be used directly for killing or maiming human beings, or even the pure or fundamental research undertaken with the specific purpose of eventual applicaton for developing weapons for such purposes, need to ponder over both the purpose and eventual use and misuse of their work.
Indeed, the concerns of ethics and human rights, the concerns of human beings, society and its environment are increasingly breaking the boundary of pure and applied research; and boundaries between the ethics in physical, medical, social and other branches of science.
Biomedical research: Medicine has a component of pure biomedical research which does not require direct participation of human and animal subjects. Medical professionals work as researchers in both pure and applied biomedical research but are more visible as researchers as well as care givers in the clinical setting.
The tradition of medical ethics has endured over centuries and found place even when medicine got transformed and modernised. He designates three major domains of ethics in general and their particular application to medicine, viz. He describes decorum as comprising a variety of attitudes and actions, with names such as politeness, courage, respectfulness and resoluteness; the qualities that are often called virtues or vices.
Deontology deon means duty or obligation is built around the understanding of what one ought to or ought not to do, and thus is expressed in terms of rules, guidelines and principles. And the politic ethics, a term not so often used in the ethics discourse, looks beyond the individual, to the society, to the individual in relationship with others, and the medicine in relation to society.
Thus, the guidelines getting converted into codes for regulations, the formal mechanisms for their practical application and the concern for the purpose and wider impact of medical research fall in the domain of politic ethics. Despite its profound history, medical ethics before World War II paid more attention to consolidating the power of the medical profession and to arbitrating the disputes within the profession than protecting patients and research subjects 1,2.
But the War stirred the sedate tradition of medical ethics. On August 19, , 20 Nazi physicians and three medical administrators were handed verdicts by the Nuremberg War Tribunal for their participation in murder, torture and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science. Nine of them were sentenced to long prison terms and seven were sentenced to death by hanging for subjecting unwilling victims to medical procedures that were called scientific experiments, thereby having caused their death, disfigurement or disability.
Interestingly, the War also brought about scientific revolution in medicine as during the War the US poured money for more effective military medicine, and the financial support for medical research continued even after the war. Thus, between the early s and , treatment for infections, delicate surgical procedures, life sustaining devices and so forth were discovered and brought into use in medicine and they in term brought forth new ethical problems.
In the s, thus came into existence the new discipline of bioethics. The Nuremberg tribunal also formulated the Nuremberg code for scientific experiments with voluntary informed consent as the central feature. Further development in the formulation of ethical guidelines for biomedical research, however, had to wait for a controversy or research scandal in the s and s.
The first was the impact of a paper by Beecher 3 reviewing ethics in 22 cases of research. It showed that investigators had endangered the health or life of their subjects without informing them of the risks or obtaining their consent. Soon this was followed by the scandal of research, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, initiated in by the US Public health Service in Macon County, Alabama to determine the natural course of untreated, latent syphilis in black males. It comprised syphilitic and uninfected men as control ; and went on unhindered till when the public outcry and investigations stopped it 4.
This controversy stirred the US government and as a result of the Senate hearings, the Congress passed the Research Act of that made it necessary the establishment of Institutional Review Boards. At the same time in , the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research was appointed; it operated till and published its now famous Belmont Report in 5.
The social sciences comprise several disciplines, such as anthropology, economics, sociology, psychology, demography, statistics etc. For undertaking research in all of them, scientists cannot but deal with human beings or the data generated by other agencies, including governments, on human beings.
Thus, social sciences deal systematically with the behaviour, status, relationships among people; with the social institutions created and operated by them; and with the social and physical environment in which they function and relate to each other. A researcher doing social inquiry into the functioning of the market, state, family, health services and systems, individuals in various institutions, and so on, is therefore, dealing with human individuals, collectivities and their institutions.
Besides, social institutions are not simple organisations devoid of their good and bad elements; they all are embodiments of the kind of power structures existing within society. The information made available from the social inquiry could be a powerful tool for further entrenching those in power as well as for unseating them in favour of others; for increasing exploitation and oppression as well as for getting rid of them.
Thus, the use of the findings of social research could have far-reaching consequences for the autonomy, well being and privacy of the individual as well as communities and the society. Indeed, the purpose for which the research is undertaken, the way research is conducted and the manner in which its findings are used; all have direct relationship, involvement or impact on human beings, and that makes social research the most contested terrain in the research enterprise.
The 17th and 18th centuries that heralded systematic social inquiry also were a part of the era of development of modem scientific method, one of the aims of which was to discover, in a rational way, the laws governing nature. While this inaugurated great revolution in science, it also made an impact by bringing the method of science to the social sciences. This became known as positivism in the philosophy of social sciences. It is an approach that "applies scientific method to human affairs conceived as belonging to a natural order open to objective inquiry" 7.
In the early years of development of social sciences, this approach was not seriously challenged. According to Barnes 6, "empirical inquiry in sociology began with the poor, in social anthropology with natives and in psychology, after an early period when highly trained respondents were used, with students".
When the objects of research are highly subordinated and the outcome of research enlightenment or discovery of truth for elite scientists, such approach could easily hold sway; and the scientists hardly talked of ethics in such an endeavour. But unlike atoms and chemicals, these objects are living human beings, and so they not only talk to researchers but also talk back. Society of humans cannot be treated as terrain for unattached objective research in the same way as laboratory, and since they are not static and society not a finished product, the humans also shape and reshape the social laws and structures.
Like social scientists, biomedical scientists have also objected to ethical review of biomedical research, and much has been gained from the ensuing debates. This chapter reviews much of this recent debate, and proposes the application of a framework developed by Emanuel, Wendler, and Grady We provide grounds for arguing, further, that social science research, with a few clear exceptions, should be rigorously ethically reviewed, and that research ethics committees have an obligation to be competent in the appropriate review of social science research, including qualitative research.
Although the chapter refers largely to social science research, we include psychological research as a major domain of social science research. Keywords: research ethics , social science research , research ethics review. Douglas R. Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase.
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It would be inconsistent with the commitments of social science research to focus their efforts only on particular groups, such as the white middle class, and condone or promote unfair treatment of others. Level 4: Ethical Theory About the first three levels, there is considerable agreement in the standard model see Figure 1. Kitchener , and many others. But it is at the next level—ethical theory—that advocates of the standard model disagree.
Originally, Beauchamp and Childress , p. This view is also present in our model and in several other versions, although once again it remains unclear precisely how ethical theory relates to ethical principles; our own view is that ethical theory does not algorithmically entail ethical principles but rather functions as an heuristic aid in reflecting on ethical principles.
Although individuals may disagree about the precise justificatory role ethical theories play, there is widespread agreement that higher-order theoretical principles are useful and sometimes necessary in moral reasoning.
Here there is room for considerable disagreement. For reasons of space, certain views will be excluded from discussion.
Ethical egoism one should always act to benefit only oneself has not seemed to be a viable ethical principle to most ethical theorists. The same is true of theological ethics one should act as God or scripture mandates. These accounts, although interesting, are not directly relevant to social science research ethics and have not been particularly influential in the field.
The same can be said for postmodernist ethics see Chapter 2, this volume. Historically speaking, natural law theory natural rights theory is the view that ethical obligations, moral standards, and one's rights are somehow a part of the natural order including the nature of the person.
Natural law theory and natural rights theory are closely related and are still prevalent in the thinking of many people e. In ancient times, natural law theory was opposed to the radical social conventionalism of the Sophists and Skeptics.
A less radical form provided the basis for contractarianism, the view that moral standards, human rights, and justice are based on the hypothetical agreement individuals are assumed to make to certain kinds of social, political, and moral norms or conventions. There are two contemporary versions of this view. According to Hobbes, humans originally can be imagined to exist in a state of nature, in which their behavior is governed by pure self-interest. Individuals would come to see the advantage of forming larger social groups and creating institutions such as the government and the law, whereby individuals would agree to give up some of their rights in exchange for a more secure life where a sovereign power would provide security.
A second version of this view is sometimes called Kantian contractualism Rawls, Rawls's original position was similar to Hobbes's, but Rawls suggests constraints that operate to restrict one's agreement. One of these is that of the veil of ignorance, in which one does not know what position one would occupy in society and one then chooses what norms of justice should exist in society. Rawls assumes that it would be rational for individuals to choose those norms that are, in fact, fair and just.
This position is thus a combination of contractarianism and the Kantian universalizability principle. Given the centrality of issues of human rights and of justice in contemporary social science research ethics, a view like Rawls's has been deeply influential.
An ethical theory that has always been important is virtue theory. According to Aristotle , moral humans are those who have good character. They have developed their innate moral faculties as a result of practice, a good family and social environment, and feedback from other morally good agents.
To become good, one must learn how to act in a morally proper way, thereby creating appropriate moral traits or virtues such as wisdom, honesty, courage, bravery, and so on. Our function as human beings is to become rational individuals, thereby attaining a state of well-being and flourishing. This occurs, Aristotle insisted, only if one has a proper social and political setting; if one does, then one can be expected to make good judgments in one's life and hence be trusted.
This was the assumption made by most individuals during the s about physicians and the kind of research they performed: They could be trusted to behave in a morally proper way because they are virtuous. However, as a result of biomedical research in the first half of the 20th century, in Nazi Germany and in the United States, this assumption was questioned.
Consequently, external ethical review was mandated, encapsulated in current codes of ethics, governmental regulations, and external review by IRBs. If the results are good e. One calculates the positive and negative consequences for everyone, which determines the goodness of the action. This at least is the view of act-utilitarianism—that action is morally right that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of individuals.
Later, a second version was proposed: rule-utilitarianism—that action is morally right that is an instance of a general rule, the establishment of which would produce the greatest good for the greatest number of individuals. As many have pointed out, some version of utilitarianism underlies cost-benefit analysis, of making sure that the benefits of the research outweigh the negative consequences or harm produced by it.
Such a position also seems to lie behind the principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence. If utilitarianism is one of the pillars of modern research ethics, the other is deontology.
The deontologist claims that the moral correctness or incorrectness of an action is determined by inspecting the inherent properties of the envisioned action or rule.
If it does not have these properties e. The most famous deontologists were Immanuel Kant and W. A second formulation of the categorical imperative was as follows: Treat humanity, whether others or yourself, always as an end and never merely as a means.
In short, one should never exploit people but treat them as intrinsically valuable. Clearly, much of the current thinking about research ethics is explicitly based on something like a Kantian deontology: Respect people's rights, treat them as autonomous agents, don't deceive them, and so on, are explicitly Kant-inspired ethical principles.
Another deontological theory is the approach of W. Ross According to Ross, there are several kinds of ethical duties we have that emerge as a result of encountering certain kinds of personal and social situations.
These he called prima facie duties; these obligations can only be overridden by other ethical considerations. For example, moral principles like those proposed earlier are neither absolute nor relative, but they are always relevant. They can be overturned only when there are other ethical duties that outweigh them.
Finally, there has arisen a feminist ethics, sometimes called the ethics of care, which has influenced our model. According to this view e. One's duty is to care for them, look after their welfare and well-being, and nurture their growth and development.
Although this view is critical of abstract ethical rules and principles, it should remind researchers that they have some obligation to care for research participants.
These theories of ethics represent most contemporary approaches to a philosophy of ethics. For most of the 20th century, the major contenders were deontology and utilitarianism, but in the s, virtue theory became a strong third candidate. Since then, there has emerged a plethora of competing views about the nature of ethical obligation.
So far, we have mentioned four levels of ethical behavior and decision making. As we proceeded through this list, the discussion became more and more abstract, hence removed from the nitty-gritty of ethical decision making. And yet, such a model is part of the standard view.
One could also argue that it is implicitly present in the Belmont Report and in the ethical stance to be found in the published volumes of many national commissions.
However, our last level—the level of meta-ethics—is not explicitly present in these accounts, although it is implicitly in them and one that is necessary to add to the standard model. Level 5: Meta-Ethics The subject matter of meta-ethics concerns questions about ethical theory; it is not concerned with ethical theory itself. Fundamentally, it is concerned with the meaning and justification of ethical statements. Although this has rarely been pointed out, biomedical and social science ethics have debated issues in meta-ethics for decades.
The questions that are at the center of this discussion include the following. First, is there a single ethical theory e. Most individuals seem to assume a pluralism, in which all the various ethical approaches have something to offer when it comes to thinking about matters ethical.
Second, since not all these ethical theories are simultaneously compatible but rather conflict, which one should guide our ethical reflection?
Utilitarianism might recommend a cost-benefit approach, whereas deontology might propose that one should never violate an individual's privacy. Since different ethical theories conflict, how should one decide which one to follow? Currently, there are several approaches to this question. A rankings approach suggests that the various ethical theories need to be ranked in importance and weighted; for example, deontology is higher than utilitarianism.
A balancing approach claims that all the approaches are valuable and, in a given situation, must be balanced to get the best overall combination. A third issue concerns the question of the appropriate method to use in applied ethics. If particular cases are at the bottom and abstract general principles are at the top, then the question is whether one proceeds in a top-down fashion or in a bottom-up fashion.
In the top-down approach, one begins with abstract ethical theory or principles and then proceeds to apply these principles to concrete cases, most typically by a deductive process deductivism.
A somewhat related top-down approach is specificationism Richardson, , which proceeds by taking a general ethical norm and making it more specific by incorporating more and more details about the why, when, how, and so on, until the specified norms lead to a directive about the particular case at hand.
One can also combine specification with balancing. On the other hand, one can also proceed in an inductive manner. One begins with judgment about particular cases and then proceeds to induce a general summary statement covering these cases. In this approach, a general ethical principle or theory is just a convenient summary of what has already been decided. More radical than inductivism is particularism.
Being opposed to ethical theory and hence denying the existence and need for general ethical principles or theory, particularism argues that one makes an ethical judgment or decision after looking at all the details of a particular case. There is no reason to think that another particular case will have any property of sufficient ethical importance to warrant a general connection between such cases.
Everything is decided on a case-by-case basis. Hence, particularism denies ethical rules, ethical principles, and ethical theory. These cases, if sufficiently important, are taken to be paradigm cases. One can then classify these various paradigm cases in a taxonomy and proceed to reason by analogy from them to new cases. Casuistry does not deny the importance of some ethical principles but insists that inferential principles involve reasoning by analogy between particular cases.
This cluster of ethical principles is self-sufficient and not in need of justification by higher-order ethical theory; however, these principles do justify lower-level ethical rules—for example, confidentiality. When there is a conflict between such ethical principles, one may appeal to ethical theory as a useful heuristic aid in making an ethical decision about how to resolve such a conflict, but ethical theory does not deductively support a univocal decision about which principle takes preeminence.
Principlism seems to be the dominant view in bioethics and the behavioral sciences, being present in the Belmont Report and explicitly advocated in Beauchamp and Childress It is also advocated by K. It is explicitly present in the revision of the APA code, which marks a radical change from previous versions, and is not present in other codes of ethics. There are at least two alternatives to principlism: 1 the existence of a set moral rule with no higher-order set of ethical principles and 2 the existence of ethical theory and a set of ethical rules.
We could diagram the possibilities as in Figure 1. We believe that each of these approaches can be found among the national commissions established by the federal government in the decades since the s. As noted previously, we argue for the last option. Conclusion No one has yet written a comprehensive history of social science research ethics, nor has anyone written a theoretical account of the ethics of social science research that is both sensitive to the empirical, scientific details of this area and grounded in an adequate philosophical theory.
Although we do not feel that our approach sufficiently does these things, we do hope we can stimulate others to reflect on these issues and to work on producing an up-to-date and comprehensive account of the historical and philosophical issues surrounding the ethics of social science research.
Such a project, in our view, would involve a discussion of several collateral issues, ones that have yet to be thoroughly considered: What is the value of social science knowledge? How does one compare this value with the value of behaving in a morally adequate way during the research enterprise?
What is the appropriate method or methods to use in social science research? Is there a unified method applicable to all the social sciences, or must one be content with a radical pluralism in the methodology of the social sciences? Are the social sciences value laden and, if so, in what sense?
Is this quality of being value laden compatible with claiming objectivity in the social sciences? And so forth. While we wait for such an account, we must be content with something much more restrictive—a sketchy and admittedly incomplete model of social science research ethics. Although we recognize the inadequacies of our model and its shortcomings, we nevertheless believe that it provides the beginnings of a plausible account of the ethics of social science research. References American Anthropological Association.
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