Proposta de uma Estrutura Ética em Pesquisa

Abstract

Throughout human history, human beings have sought ways to improve their living conditions, where, at first, the challenges were to create ways to protect themselves from animals and the climate, then they began to produce tools and utensils to facilitate their daily chores. Today, we explore everything from the smallest particles to the distant planets, and information and communication technologies allow us to share knowledge on a global level. In view of this, due to the prerogatives that new technologies offer, it is vital to consider good ethical values so that research can fulfil its true social role, as it is a means of expanding knowledge, which is also used to create services and products in order to meet some of the necessity of life. Research has the potential to profoundly alter society, and so it needs to be planned and executed with integrity and ethics for the well-being of individuals and the progress of civilisation. Given this context, this paper aims to present a Research Ethics Framework that can assist researchers to assess the ethicality of what they intend to investigate, or to evaluate a completed work. The Research Ethics Framework was applied to a completed research study where it was found that, although, in general, it was conducted ethically, it could nevertheless have been submitted to a Research Ethics Committee so that it could have an independent backing on its ethicality.