The four constraints in social science research are scientific, administrative, ethical, and political. Ethical and political constraints are the focus of Chapter 18.

1. ETHICS OF SOCIAL RESEARCH

ETHICS

• Defined as general agreements shared by researchers as to what is right or wrong in the conduct of scientific inquiry.
• Stem from religion, political ideologies, and culture.
• Each profession has a standard code of ethics.
• Ethics may vary from one point in time to another.
• Ethical considerations enter at all stages of social research.

 A. Voluntary participation: Social researchers agree that participation in research should be voluntary. This principle is easier to accept than to apply in practice. Some research subjects, such as students and incarcerated persons, may volunteer because they believe that they will personally benefit from their cooperation. The ethical principle of voluntary participation can conflict with the scientific need for generalizability because volunteers may not be representative of the population of interest.

B. No harm to participants: Research should not harm those who participate in it, unless they willingly and knowingly accept the risks of harm. Social research can harm research subjects in several ways:

• Physical harm is rare in social sciences.
• Social researchers cause psychological harm when they ask respondents to reveal stressful, embarrassing, anxiety producing, unpopular, or deviant behavior.
• Research subjects can be harmed by the analysis and reporting of data, especially when they can recognize themselves in subsequent research reports characterizing them in negative terms.
• A researcher is responsible for protecting subjects from increased risk of arrest. Failure to do so may legally harm research subjects.

D. Deceiving subjects: Deceiving subjects is sometimes justified in circumstances where revealing a researcher's identity might force research subjects to modify their behavior. Debriefing subjects is recommended if it is at all necessary to lie to them.

E. Analysis and interpretation of data. The ethical obligations to one's colleagues in the scientific community require that we:

• Report findings as objectively as possible.
• Report the technical shortcomings and failures of the study.
• Do not report accidental findings as the product of careful hypothesizing and theorizing.
• Avoid plagiarism (steal ideas or writings of another person and use them without citing them), and
• Research fraud (invent data that were not collected, or falsely report how research was conducted).

•  What ethical considerations were violated in each of these case studies?
• Could the researcher have achieved similar findings without violating research ethics? In other words, is it possible that a researcher can accomplish the same purpose without violating research ethics?
• Do the benefits of these scientific undertakings justify putting subjects at risk or deceiving them?

2. THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL RESEARCH

How do ethical and political concerns differ?

• Ethics deals with methods employed
• Political issues deal with the substance and use of research
• There are no formal codes of accepted political conduct comparable to the codes of ethical of conduct. One exception to the absence of political norms is the generally accepted stance that a researcher's political ideology should not interfere with or unduly influence her or his research.

Case studies illustrating that political issues exist in social research

• Social research and race relations

(Gunnar Myrdal, James Coleman, and Arthur Jensen)
• Project Calemot

• Social science research is closely connected with political concerns. Social science cannot remain antiseptically objective because science is part of social life.
• Social science proceeds even under political controversy.
• It is important to make ideological considerations a part of the backdrops we create as this will improve our awareness as we study research methods.