Research ethics.

Regardless of where the research is conducted, in the lab or in

the field, what kind of research method is used, (correlation or
experimental) or what kind of measures are employed (self
reports or observations), ethical issues must always be
considered .Researchers in all fields have moral and legal
responsibility to abide by ethical principles.

Its against that back ground, that social psychologists before

conducting a research, he or she must make sure that the
research plan stands up to moral and ethical evaluation .

Ethical guides for human research. This gained momentum after

the world 11 which sow concerned researcher coming up to
protect the lives of participants’ any research.Intially its said
that ,Germany researchers did some mistreatment to research
participants including children .

It’s against that oversight that organisations such as the

American psychology Association and American medical
Association begun to examine their own research practices. No
inhumanities were found to that effect that could be compared to
those that were committed by Germanys. They added that even
in America some participants were treated badly as a result of
biomedical research that put human life at risk with out their
knowledge of such risks.

Not only that, but also some live diseases organisms were
injected into participants. Most shocking however, was the new
surgical operations that patients experienced that were not
related to their sickness in question. Although researchers were
careful to provide the best known safeguards, nevertheless they
carried out with out participant’s knowledge and consent.
To clarify on the above, most patients were injected live cancer
with out their knowledge .This and many other examples
generated concern to whether the participants must be aware of
what is taking place or the researcher should continue deceiving
participants in order to obtain data?

Many research writers maintain that participants’ must be

protected against deception of any kind. They added that
participants’ have a right to know what is going to be done on
them and to be given clear information so that they can freely
consent or freely to take part in the intended research. Despite
the continued debates a bout the same, participants’ have gained
more rigorous safe guard in all research fields.

Social psychology that deals with human kinds is slightly

disturbing and with many risks but can not be compared those in
biomedical research. On the issues of deception, inversion of
privacy, and right to be informed, so as to be able make free
choice are still applied to psychology research.

Inversion of privacy is common with social scientists as they deal

with human behaviors. They examine sensitive areas of
psychological adjustment such as sexual behaviors, private
thoughts, and relationships between couple’s .social psychologists
usually gain access to confidential records of Patients in hospitals
or children in schools for their research.

Deception in psychology research has become a standard in some

areas of study although it’s still too mild that no body has ever
paid attention to its practices. For example telling students to
draw lines on blackboard is deception because the intention of
the researcher is to know how one student influences the other in
their drawings of lines (deception)
Deception has been attacked repeatedly as ethically unacceptable
and morally reprehensible. However, research has revealed that
subjects who have participated in deception experiments versus
no deception experiments enjoyed the experience more, received
more educational benefit from it, and did not mind being deceived
or having their privacy invaded. Such evidence suggests that
deception, although unethical from a moral point of view, is not
considered to be aversive, undesirable, or an unacceptable
methodology from the research participant's point of view. The
repeated assumption of the unacceptability of deception seems to
be due to the fact that deception has been evaluated only from
the viewpoint of moral philosophizing. This has led to the repeated
conclusion that deception is reprehensible and seems to have
created a perceptual set to view deception immediately as
aversive. However, the perception of the unethical nature of
deception seems to be minimal in studies that investigate
innocuous public behaviors and enhanced in studies that run the
risk of harming research participants or in studies that investigate
private behaviors. When this knowledge is combined with the fact
that research participants do not mind being deceived, and that it
can also be viewed as immoral not to conduct research on
important problems, the scale seems to be tilted in favor of
continuing the use of deception in psychological research.

It must be noted that society is in need of solutions to many

problems such as poverty, physical illness such as AIDS, and
cancer so to handle such problems needs community
participation but searching for solution may violate individual’s
rights to privacy and to proper treatment .

Although research has many significant importances to humanity,

it also exposes participants to many risks, so to solve these
dilemmas researchers have adopted the following ideas;
1. That research offers benefits to society and other scientific
disciplines.
2. And those individuals will behave in a socially responsible
manner and contribute to knowledge development by
participating in research.
3. Participants have basic rights either to take part in the
research or not .Even to privacy and protection from
physical and psychological harm .Additionally , right to
information of the study at hand on which to base their
decision whether to participate or not.
4. Its there for the responsibility of all researchers to conduct
research in such manner as to respect participants rights
and protect them from physical and psychological harm.
The first professional organisation to develop ethical
guidelines for research was the Americans psychology
association. It recognised that in order to receive
information, some research employee’s deception, makes
participants uncomfortable this and other conditions of
research places the participants at risk