Balancing ethical quandaries with scientific rigor: Part 2.

ABSTRACT

Traditional ethical concerns in research tend to focus on serious misconduct such as fabricating data and gross violations of informed consent. In this two-part article, we focused on some of the less serious and more subtle ethical quandaries, inherent and common in most social science research. It is our thesis that these issues are important and warrant more attention and careful thought than they have been accorded in the scientific literature and, perhaps, by investigators at large. In Part 2, we provided examples of how we, and others, dealt with some of these issues in actual studies. However, we also must emphasize the individual and reflective nature of confronting ethical issues in research. We found many benefits in using a team approach to address ethical dilemmas during implementation of our studies. Doing so kept everyone honest with themselves and each other, shared the burden of responsibility among team members for the decisions made, maximized the use of team members' strengths, and led to much better resolutions of the issues from both a scientific and an ethical perspective. Maintaining scientific rigor while balancing and deliberating about the ethical implications of decisions is a challenge for all research teams. It requires learning how to be vigilant and responsive when faced with the many subtle, but ever-present, scientific and ethical quandaries encountered when doing what is often assumed to be nonthreatening social research. There are no fixed, prescriptive rules for what to do in every study. Rather, a reflective process, considering the specific issues of each unique study, is required.