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led to establishing a data-protection secretariat within the Norwegian Research Council for Science
and Humanities and eventually in the late 1960s and 1970s to various laws ensuring protection of data
(ibid.) and spurring the development and codification of ethics in Europe and the US.

Social scientists have long pointed out that ethics has always formed an implicit part of the discourse
among the founders of sociology such as Durkhiem and Weber and of later scholars too. Even as these
founders of sociology strived to establish a discipline based on scientific principles, free from the
moralizing and values of contemporary society, they engaged with ethical concerns, even implying
that the very practice of sociology in fact, involved the developing of guidelines to assess social good.
Shils, for instance, asserts, “The true calling of sociology is to contribute to the self-understanding of
society” (Shils, 1980).

There has been long-standing debate and discourse on the issue of ethics in social sciences (see Barnes,
1977) and there has been considerable resistance to a codification of ethics. On the other hand, some
social scientists have strongly argued that social sciences should get out of the “Imperialism of a
research ethics constructed for the purposes of governing biomedical research…” (Emmerich, 2016).
He further argues for “a practical or pragmatic diversity in the ethical standards that guide practice”
cautioning that this was not a claim for accepting contradictions in ethical practice or allowing
for loose definitions of ethics. Rather, Emmerich writes, “It is, simply, to recognize that the ethical
requirements of a profession as a whole need not be an entirely aligned, and that there may be a
justification for the adoption of alternative perspectives in professional sub-domains” (ibid.)
In sum, codes, guidelines and principles in social science and behavioural science research had
begun to be established across Europe and the US only in the late 20th century with their further
development and codification gathering pace with the expansion of social science disciplines across
the world and encompassing many cultures.

The Modern Scenario

The American Sociological Association (ASA) published its first modern code of ethics in 1989 and
focused on three general areas:

1. Full disclosure of motivations for the research: This addressed the fear among social scientists that
they may be used to extract information from the general public by agencies of social control
(government, police, and the like.). The code exhorted sociologists to disclose agency and not to
misuse their position as researchers to gather unnecessary data.
2. Avoidance of harm: This referred to the need for sociologists not to issue assurances if they were
not able to fulfill those obligations.
3. Assurance of adequate qualifications for conducting the research: This third code anticipated
the continuous developments in the discipline in that it needed the researcher to make an
assurance that the expertise used was adequate to the research on hand. This part of the
code is extraordinary, say commentators, in that it spells the conflict between a sociology
that by definition and practice is critical of authority of established institutions and the
acknowledgement of the limitations of current theories, tools and technologies available for
sociological inquiry. (ASA, 2018).
Acknowledging the legitimacy of these differences in an ethical principle reflects a strenuous attempt
by sociology as a social system to accommodate subgroups whose basic approaches to the discipline
are inconsistent with each other in important respects”.
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