Abstract
This book aims to assist those carrying out research in social work in particular, and social science, in general, in their attempt to maintain the highest ethical standards. While for a long time, ethics codes concerned the social work practice and less the social work research, this book tends to fill a gap and consider issues that apply to this last sector. Grounded in research and practices developed for biomedical studies, the book presents the main ethical issues relevant to various phases in social work research. It asks practical questions and provides sensible guidelines to consider before, during, and after carrying out a research in the social field.
The book structure is built upon the seven domains the U.S. Federal Office of Research Integrity considers essential to responsible conduct of research, namely: (1) research misconduct (e.g., fabrication and falsification of data, plagiarism); (2) mentor/trainee responsibilities (e.g., understanding the boundaries of the relationship); (3) professional conflicts (e.g., financial and personal, conflicts of time/effort); (4) collaborative science (e.g., differing expectations, power differentials); (5) research subjects protection (e.g., conducting research with vulnerable populations); (6) data management: acquisition, sharing, and ownership (e.g., confidentiality, privacy, storage, and data integrity); (7) publication practices, peer review, and responsible authorship (e.g., authorship credit, order of authorship, student–faculty collaboration, and peer-review requirements).
Covering so many areas that are not free from their own dilemmas, in not more than 170 pages is, nevertheless, an ambitious project. Therefore, the book does not aim to provide handy solutions for otherwise intricate situations but to outline issues that call for attention, to present central principles and sources for further information (drawn exclusively from U.S. regulations). The author has done a remarkable job in maintaining a concise and practice-oriented structure that touches upon a large range of issues: from personal beliefs that risk jeopardizing the professional judgment, to the emerging requirements on data sharing or the challenges in protecting anonymity in web-based surveys. Each chapter ends with several insightful case examples presenting ethical dilemmas and additional resources. They may also work as useful tools for class debates.
With an easily approachable language, free from the theoretical jargon of applied ethics, the book is particularly suited for social work researchers from both academia and the social sector, when considering the issues of research integrity and conduct. The underlying message advises that research choices do have ethical implications and researchers need to be informed about existing regulations.
Overall, the book is normative in character and largely grounded in the governmental or university regulations that apply to the U.S. research environment. The reader should not expect issues of a more problematic or ambivalent nature to be thoroughly analyzed. The book is a practical, easy to use tool and not a platform for asking questions that go beyond what is now included in an ethical code. In this respect, the book attempts to cover a wide array of issues without doing sufficient justice to the more controversial ones. The book is never critical to any ethical guidelines and does not cultivate this notion among its readers.
For instance, in the section on conducting research with children, the requirement of parental consent is assumed as unproblematic. The premise that children “need additional protection” (p. 84) goes unchallenged. There is no discussion on the power imbedded in the principles that condition children’s participation in a research by adults’ choice. Recent research in sociology of childhood, however, argues that declining children a voice may risk reproducing abusive relationships (Campbell, 2008; Kitzinger, 2006). Nonetheless, such debates are often not very useful when research proposals are being submitted to ethical boards. However, one needs to consider that the notion of what harms children is continuously changing (Smart, Neale, & Wade, 2001) and that ethical reasoning cannot be but a self-reflective work in progress.
Ending the book with a brief chapter on emerging challenges in responsible conduct of research is right and proper. This part offers a glimpse over the challenges involved when doing research with international and culturally diverse populations or when using Internet for data collection, open access journals, and data ownership. This section, however, lets the reader expect more, for instance in what regard the ethical challenges brought by social scientists’ involvement in the collection of biological specimens to supplement social science data.
Overall, this book would serve social work researchers well in their attempt to understand the ethical implications of their choices and to follow the ethical regulations currently in place. Although it is exclusively based on U.S. ethical codes, it can serve well an international audience from educational environments where ethical guidelines in social work research are still emerging.