engleski

How much ethics is enough?

The researchers are expected to follow ethical principles in their research and to consider all aspects of their work from the ethical perspective as well. These principles are related to the protection of participants’ mental and physical wellbeing, their voluntary consent to take part in the research, the right to withdraw from it at any point and the confidentiality of the data. The participants also have the right to be informed about the research i.e. its goals. However, the researchers are faced with problems in the application of ethical principles that govern their research. The problems may be due to both their rigid application and the exceptions that arise from particular design or participant sample. In this discussion we shall focus on three key problems related to the research ethics: 1) how much ethics should be formalized ; 2) how much information given to the participants represents “informed consent” ; and 3) are there more or less ethical methods? 1) The problems related to the permissions and documents regulating the ethical issues of the research are more practical in nature– the most important one being the slow and complicated procedures of obtaining the required documents. Apart from making planning virtually impossible, raising the matter of issuing ethical approvals to the ministerial level raises the questions of individual freedom and responsibilities of the institutions involved in research. 2) There are many exceptions to the “informed consent” principle. To obtain valid data the participants should often be unaware of the real purpose of an experiment or research. Actually, the information given to the participant could alter or influence the data making the research methodologically unsound. 3) There is an implicit opinion about some methods being more or less ethical. In general, techniques that measure some physiological parameter, such as eye movements, pupil size, skin conductance or EEG, are regarded as experimental techniques that require more extensive ethical considerations and documentation for the procedure. However, we claim that ethical issues should be considered on case-to-case basis and that simple paper and pencil methods could sometimes be more questionable from the ethical perspective. Examples from actual psycholinguistic research will be provided for each of the points above and the discussion will be focused on the real-life situation that the researchers face in their work.

research ethics; practical problems

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