Research Ethics

The slides for this week’s lecture can be found here

Week 3 - Research Ethics: Conducting research with human subjects creates an imbalance of power. In many ways, ethics help us manage and make sense of the appropriate, fair, and just use of that power to gain new knowledge. In this week we will investigate forms of normative ethics as well as their practical implementation in institutional review boards.

Ethics - Background

Ethics can be practically framed as “…the general nature of morals and of the specific moral judgments or choices to be made by a person” (Burns, 2012). This definition situates ethics as a matter of individual choice, but of course the choices we make as individuals have broad impacts on the communities we are part of, serve, and wish to see flourish. Therefore, thinking about how our ethics (values, morals, judgements) will impact our research design is an important first step. In fact, describing carefully the design of a research project and applying for institutional clearance to collect data is a requirement of any human-subject study.

There are, broadly, three types of ethical frameworks that can help guide your work in LIS research and evaluation: Virtue, consequential, and non-consequential ethics.

At face value these ethical frameworks can seem - as we discussed in Week 1 - overly abstract and not terribly helpful.

But when we begin to design research - that is, asking questions, sampling populations, collecting data, etc. - we will inevitably have to justify why this research is worth doing, and what benefits will result from doing it. We may need to justify the research to a funder who will give us money to do the research in our library or archive, or we may just need to justify this to our research participants so they will fill out a survey. An ethical framework can help us make those justifications clearly. For example, we could justify doing research about COVID-19 transmissions in public libraries because it provides valuable data about the spread of infectious disease (consequentialism) or we can do that research because public librarians have a right to know the risk of continuing to serve the public during a health crises (non-consequential). Both studies, and both sets of answers would be valuable contributions - but they have slightly different justifications for WHY they are important, and WHO will benefit from the results.

To relate this to Week 2’s lecture: If ontology is about WHAT makes up our research, and epistemology and methods are about HOW we know what we know, then ethics are really about WHY we are doing research, and who will benefit.

Guest Lecture

Mallory Shaw is the Research Development Coordinator at the UW iSchool and an expert on all things related to institutional compliance with research ethics boards. In this short lecture she is going to introduce you to the IRB at UW and the background information you’ll need to complete an IRB application.

Readings

The required reading this week is from a short introductory textbook on philosophy. If you aren’t particularly interested in the subject of ethics - you will be better served by reading the Summary section of this article and then diving into one of the suggested readings instead. But, to be clear on why we are reading this - Virtue, Consequential and Deontological ethics are probably the most common ways that a researcher will argue for “ethical” choices. Being able to clearly and easily pick these out will help immensely in your future work.

Burns, S (2017) A Discourse on Modern Philosophy - Different Kinds of Ethics. Available at HTML

LIS Research Spotlight

OR

Suggested

Exercise

This week’s exercise asks you to consider some cases of research ethics. For each scenario, imagine that you sit on an institutional review board. In reading the scenario, and thinking about its ethical concerns, here are some questions you might try to answer:

  1. Tyrone wants to study the impact of watching sexually suggestive/explicit television on people’s attitudes toward sex. He plans to test ninth graders because he believes they are still young enough to be highly impressionable. He will solicit volunteers to come after school. Half will be as-signed to watch one hour of sexually explicit clips from a cable TV show while the other half will view an hour of clips from the same show that deal with nonsexual topics. After watching the TV shows, all participants will fill out a questionnaire about the attitudes toward sex.

  2. Priya is interested in whether listening to music while working out makes people exercise harder. She plans to ask college students to come to the gym and run on a treadmill for half an hour either while listening to music or in silence. The dependent measure will be the number of miles run in that time period.

  3. Charlotte wants to research the effect of labeling students (gifted vs. struggling) on their achievement in second grade. She proposes that students in an elementary school’s second grade be divided into reading groups in which ability levels (as determined by previous test scores) are evenly mixed. One group will be told they are gifted readers, another group will be told that they are struggling readers, and a third group will be told nothing at all. Charlotte theorizes that by the end of the second-grade year, the students in the “gifted” level group will outperform those in the “struggling” group on the same reading test.

Note: This week’s exercise comes from a book by Dr. Allyson J. Weseley on practical research ethics.

Discussion Section Recordings

Note - you must be logged into your UW account to access these recordings.