Research methods Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Research methods - Essay Example However, the use of codes and standards not enough to stop unethical research, and the issues surrounding power and responsibility still exist. Procedural ethics need to be combined with personal integrity and virtue to ensure the safety of the participants while allowing the researchers to gather information efficiently (Schienke et al. 2010:4). Therefore, procedural ethics alone does not meet these needs. This can be seen by the fundamental flaws in the design of ethical codes, the failure of such codes to adequately protect the subject and the researcher during a study, and finally in the ways that personal values and beliefs can be combined with procedural methods to arrive at the most ethical solution for a given problem. The fact that ethical codes are often written by those who do not actually participate in research studies leads to many of the fundamental problems with procedural ethics. Codes may written in vague and unscientific language, and sometimes are impractical in a ctual research situations, as ethics in practice may differ from ethics in theory (Roberts and Indermaur 2007). A researcher cannot always stop to consult a code or committee of ethics, and should be able to rely on his or her own moral judgment (Henn, Weinstein, and Foard 2006:73). The focus for improving ethical behaviour among researchers should therefore be on building individual moral virtue and integrity as much as or more so than attempting to perfect standards for behaviour (Devettere 2009:363). Researchers must pay close attention to the wording of their surveys or the nature of an interview, for example, in order to ensure the subject is entirely aware of their choices about participation; the procedural guidelines cannot possibly cover all informed consent situations. Poor research practices are not excused for mistakes or omissions; those practices remain unethical behaviour. (Hoye and Severinsson 2007). None of this, however, should be taken to mean that procedural ethi cs does not have a place in medical or social research. Prior to the existence of ethical codes, researchers often took part in studies that today seem horrifying, and there were very few consequences (McNeil 2010). Study subjects were exposed to dangerous and sometimes deadly situations, and were not always fully informed as to the true nature of the experiment (Henn, Weinstein, and Foard 2006:71). While the data gathered from such studies has been useful in medical science, it is obvious that such unethical practices could not be allowed to continue. Modern procedural ethics began with the Nuremberg Code, written as a result of the Nazi doctors war crimes tribunal. The first internationally accepted standards of behaviour for medical researchers, the Nuremberg Code is a listing of 10 points that should be met in ethical research on human subjects. (Hazelgrove n.d.) Highlights include voluntary informed consent, protection of the subject from harm, and that the risk of the experime nt must be lower than the predicted gain from the study (Mitscherlich and Mielke 1949). Despite this paradigm shift in the acceptability of research, in the years following the adoption of the Nuremberg Code, unethical research continued to occur. This was due in part to the fact that the legal standing of the code was unclear and was never actually cited in the