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CHAPTER 4

Research Ethics in Social Science

Padma Prakash

The purpose here is to make social scientists aware of the ethical issues that may arise while
conducting research and communicating these to the research community and to the public at large,
in various ways. As social scientists, we need an understanding of ethical practices so that we can
utilize these to make ethical choices and resolve the ethical dilemmas that are bound to emerge in the
course of any research inquiry. Social scientists need to take responsibility for their ethical practice.

Traditionally, social science includes sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, law, and
political science, although there is no rigidity on which disciplines may be included. For instance,
public health sciences may also today be regarded as a social science. Several subfields, such as,
human geography, cultural studies, business studies, development studies, forensic and criminological
studies, and creative economics may all be included in social science. This diversity offers a challenge
to evolving ethical perspectives in social science research and defining guiding principles.

Background

Ethical consideration in social science research is of more recent origin than it is in the biomedical
sciences. In medical practice and health research, ethical codes were prompted by the horrific
Nuremberg trials conducted in Nazi Germany in 1946. This gave rise to the Nuremberg Code that
insisted on voluntary participation and informed consent that has been developed further and finely
embedded and is updated periodically in all medical research (Mandal, et al., 2011).

This was followed by the Declaration of Helsinki in 1964. Despite these there have been travesties,
such as, the ghastly Tuskegee Syphilis Study in the US that began in 1932 and went on for 40 years.
The study involved 600 black men, with the objective of studying the natural history of the disease.
Patients were denied treatment even though penicillin became available in the 1950s. Only when a
reporter broke the story did it come to light. These dramatic and tragic incidents have made for a
body of ethics that is applied in medical/clinical research.

To what extent do ethical issues in the sciences apply to behavioural and social sciences? There
are some classic cases of extreme violations of ethics within social science and humanities, some
documented and others not. An oft-mentioned case is the Stanley Milgram’s “obedience to authority”
study in the US in 1963, which was supposed to examine if administering shocks would enhance
learning. No consent was taken from the study volunteers and nor were they allowed to quit midway
(Mandal, ibid.).
The watershed moment for the development of ethics in the social sciences was perhaps the 1960s
Norwegian study, the so-called Metropolitan study, involving school children. One part of the study
aimed to follow boys from age 11 to adulthood so as to provide better vocational guidance and social
assistance in the future. The government supplied the required information on the cohorts to the
researchers, which attracted enormous public criticism for revealing private data without consent
and demanding better safeguards. But the reluctance of the researchers in amending the project led to
severe backlash for social research in the country and in Europe (Johansen, et al., 2001: 35–37). This

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