Social Science Research Ethics Research Articles

Human Rights and Human Subjects: Ethics and Strategies in Social Science Research*

New guidelines implemented by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services exempt broad categories of social science research from regulation by university review boards. The analysis examines how exemption from regulation will change the way researchers manage ethical matters in the future. Social scientists will wish to protect the rights of research subjects and, at the same time, study sensitive social issues by scientific designs. As in the past, these goals will be incompatible in various ways. The analysis examines the parameters within which researchers will deal with several ethical and methodological dilemmas.

The Ethnographic Enterprise and the Bureaucratization of Ethics: The Problem of Human Subjects Legislation

Recent U.S. government guidelines relating to the protection of human research subjects, in attempting to legislate ethics in social science research, have raised a variety of ethical problems worth critical examination in relation to ethnography. Recent liberalization of the relevant legislation does not make discussion of these issues less urgent. This article amplifies earlier discussions to include additional issues: (1) the relevance of Constitutional guarantees of freedom of the press in connection with ethnographic description; (2) the possibility of an ethnographer's notes being subpoenaed; (3) the obligation to make one's ethnographic record as useful as possible to future generations of the population studied.

Erratum: Ethics in Social Science Research

In the article "Ethics in social science research" (News and Comment, 2 Nov.. p. 537) several errors appear. Ruth Macklin is incorrectly identified as Ruth Warwick; Alexander Capron is on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. not Harvard; and Laud Humphreys did his doctoral work in sociology, not social relations, at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, not at Harvard.

Social science research ethics.

Social science research ethics.

Ethics in social science research.

Ethics in social science research.