Ethics in Research: Privacy, Informed Consent, and Recruitment (Essay Sample)

Module Overview
Politics and Ethics
In Module Eight, we will examine the important concept of ethics in business research. Although there is no chapter dedicated to ethics in your textbook, you have explored ethics in business research in many of your assigned readings including ethics in the preliminary stages of investigation, ethics in literature reviews, ethics in data collection, and ethical considerations in experimental design. While not all of these will relate to your final project in this course, they are important considerations that you may someday face while conducting business research.
Along with ethical considerations in business research, politics must also be considered when conducting research within a business setting. Similar to the issues that scholars face in research, the business researcher will also encounter issues such as managing relationships between the researcher and their direct supervisors, relationships and accountability between researchers and the organization, and relationships with other departments. Each of these relationships can exert “political” pressure on the researcher. For example, consider the potential consequence of completing a research project that directly affects an activity or policy that is sponsored or implemented by your boss; your research finding demonstrates that your boss’s policy is not as effective as the boss has previously claimed. How can this be handled? The same can be true for a business researcher who is conducting research on a new product that has been heavily promoted and funded by the organization. Your research does not support previous product claims by the organization, and your results would threaten the future sales. How do you report the results? Political pressure may be exerted to “slant” or downplay actual results. Pharmaceutical companies are often faced with this dilemma.
Other political implications such as the motivation for choosing and executing a research project can have political implications. For example, an influential individual within the organization may strongly request that a research project be executed to promote their own internal agenda.
As you review the text chapters covering ethics, keep in mind that you will need to consider and discuss ethical considerations in the business problem, research design, and the data analysis portion of your final project, and requirements are outlined in the Final Project Rubric. Additionally, in Module Eight, you will read two peer-reviewed journal articles and will be asked to discuss in a short paper the ethical considerations covered in these journal articles.
PLEASE READ
Reading and Resources
Ethical Issues in Using the Internet in Research—1 opens in new window
This article provides an example of a research study that you will use to explore ethics in research in the module assignment.
Ethical Issues in Using the Internet in Research—2 opens in new window
This article provides another example of a research study that you will use to explore ethics in research in the module assignment.