Are you worried about whether you are ethically conducting research or not? If yes, then you are in the right place. You need to consider many ethical factors during your whole research process. Avoiding them can lead to catastrophic outcomes. It can impact the credibility of your research. You can also face serious legal actions. Moreover, your research will harm people and society more than benefit them. In the end, your research will just become a waste of time only because you did not pay attention to some essential ethical factors for conducting research. Here are some important factors that determine how ethical research is: 

Having A Proper Discussion Of Intellectual Property:

There is much competition in academia. This creates a lot of disagreements regarding who will get credit for authorship. To avoid this, you should properly discuss intellectual property rights at the start of your research. It is an important ethical factor you should consider while conducting research. Putting such understandings in a written document can help you continuously discuss the contributions as you do your research. Moreover, if you continuously use a concept or idea of research with another person, you should give him his due credit for your research. Otherwise, it would be considered unethical and can even lead to a legal dispute.

Respect Confidentiality And Privacy: 

It is important to uphold the rights of an individual to privacy and confidentiality. Researchers must find ways to ask the participants if they want to talk about sensitive issues. Researchers need to make a set of detailed questions for an interview so that participants can participate comfortably and give them an option if they don’t want to answer. Hiring experts from a PhD dissertation writing service can be an important aspect in this regard. Because in ethical research, participants have a full choice of how much information they can reveal under any circumstances.

Considering all the Ethical Obligations:

While conducting research, it is essential to know all the available ethical obligations to avoid ethical dilemmas. You should give proper details such as how you will protect confidential information, recruit participants, and the consent process. This will give clear directions on following specific ethical guidelines and principles for various research activities. This will also help you to avoid confusion and facilitate your research. 

Less Risk Of Harm:

Another important factor determining how ethical you are in conducting research is how you will reduce the risk of harm to the participants. Your research and its outcomes should not harm your participants. If there is any chance that your participation can be harmed, then you must try to minimize it by taking precautions. For instance, you can do additional planning to reduce the harm and give participants detailed information about the risks before getting consent. There are various types of harm, such as: 

  • Physical harm
  • Psychological discomfort
  • Social stress
  • Impact on financial status 
  • Risk to privacy

Obtaining Informed Consent:

Another important ethical factor to consider while conducting research is to follow informed consent rules. Doing the consent process properly will ensure that people are participating in your research voluntarily with full information of related pros and cons. It is an ethical rule that a person must have full knowledge of the things that may impact them. In ethical research, researchers inform their participants about the research aim, procedures, expected duration and many other essential things. It would be best if you also covered the magnitude and likelihood of risks or benefits of participation, focusing on the fact that their participation is voluntary. 

Informed consent is the foundation that will decide whether you are ethically conducting research or not. Getting informed consent means that participants should know the research and requirements properly. For this, you should inform them about the aim of your research, what methods you are using and what your possible results will be. It would help if you also informed them about the associated risks, inconveniencies, demands and discomforts the participants may experience. Before conducting research, it is hard to understand what information a participant would want to know. Therefore, you should make a comprehensive document leaving no material out. Another important factor is that the participation of the individual must be voluntary. For this, it would be wise for you to get signed a consent form. 

Avoiding Deception:

Your research will not be considered ethical in any way if you do not try to avoid deceptive activities. Conducting research with the use of deceptive practices is a very controversial issue. It is because uninformed participants often cannot detect deception, and researchers observe and use their data unethically in their research. This makes the use of deception very common. However, to do ethical research, you should avoid using deceptive practices at all costs as it destroys your work’s credibility. 

Providing The Right To Withdraw:

Ethical research must give its participants a proper right to withdraw at any time. Conducting research can be very hectic, and sometimes, it can frustrate some participants. In that case, you should allow your participants to withdraw even if you are at the final stage. When they choose to leave the process of your research, you should not coerce or pressure them to stop them from withdrawing. 

Conclusion:

The major purpose of research is to make useful contributions to society and to the relevant field. However, if you ignore ethical factors, you will not achieve that aim. Therefore, you must ensure to give due credit, respect participants’ privacy, reduce risks of harm, avoid deception, and obtain informed consent from the participants. These factors show how ethical you are conducting research. The credibility and reliability of your research depends upon how you conduct your research.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here