Ron Iphofen

Academy of Social Sciences, Social Research Association

With surveillance at work extending into the home and the deployment of AI in the workplace already rapidly expanding, concerns have been raised about the ramifications of these developments. Blurring the boundaries between public and private spheres, digital workplace monitoring and digital activity tracking seem set to raise stress levels and und...

This chapteroutlines what happened to research into a new and unorthodox energy technology that could have helped displace traditional energy supply methods by extracting energy from the waves at sea. The project received funding filtered via the administrative structure of the traditional and competing energy system—nuclear power. The funding sour...

This chapter agues for the importance of case studies in generating evidence to guide and/or support policymaking across a variety of fields. Case studies can offer the kind of depth and detail vital to the nuances of context, which may be important in securing effective policies that take account of influences not easily identified in more general...

This chapter brings together some of the general themes that can be gleaned from a consideration of all the case studies in this volume taken as a whole. Despite the substantive uniqueness of specific cases, no less than the ones collected here, there remain some key advantages to examining cases in detail and drawing on the broader lessons that ca...

Introducing this volume, this article reflects on recent changes that brought to the editors’ attention the need for this special issue on the methodological and ethical challenges facing those who research precarious, virtual and clandestine labour in the 21st century. An exponential spread of algorithmically managed platform labour, just-in-time...

PROmoting integrity in the use of RESearch results The overall goal of the PRO-RES project is to build a research ethics and integrity framework devised cooperatively with, and seen as acceptable by, the full range of relevant stakeholders and similar to Oviedo/ Helsinki. This will be a normative framework for evidence-based policy originating from...

Introduction: The European Union's (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was put in force on 25th May 2018. It is not known how many personal data protection requests the national authority in Croatia had received before and after GDPR, and how many of those were related to research. Materials and methods: We obtained data from the Croa...

This handbook is a ‘one-stop shop’ for current information, issues and challenges in the fields of research ethics and scientific integrity. It provides a comprehensive coverage of research and integrity issues, both within researchers’ ‘home’ discipline and in relation to similar concerns in other disciplines. The handbook covers common elements s...

The rapid and exponential growth of genome editing has posed many challenges for bioethics. This article briefly explains the nature of the technique and the particularly rapid development of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR) technology. The international and, specifically, European-level systems for assessing the et...

Evidence-based policymaking must urgently consider regulations addressing advances made in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, as well as issues of ownership, management and control. Many repetitive manufacturing tasks once requiring human labour have already been replaced by robots. The general public are facing associated risks to safety a...

This handbook is a ‘one-stop shop’ for current information, issues and challenges in the fields of research ethics and scientific integrity. It provides a comprehensive coverage of research and integrity issues, both within researchers’ ‘home’ discipline and in relation to similar concerns in other disciplines. The handbook covers common elements s...

The apparent freeing of information access and knowledge accumulation that was the promise of modern communications technology – the Internet, World Wide Web and mobile digitized telecommunications – heralded the opportunity to attain some of the ideals that have been expounded for liberal education, open and lifelong learning, informed democratic...

This is an introduction to the first volume in the book series 'Advances in research Ethics and Integrity'. The first section of the volume looks at an attempt in the UK to achieve consensus in research ethics across the social sciences and the difficulties associated with achieving such agreement. The second section takes these issues to an intern...

This chapter considers the opposition to formal ethics review and the reasons for this. The history and a summary of the Fredericton Conference, the ‘Ethics Rupture Summit’ in October 2012 are discussed. This ultimately culminated in the production of the New Brunswick Declaration, aiming to pave the way forwards beyond the rigidities of formalised...

The Academy of Social Sciences has promoted discussion among its member learned societies in order to explore the possibility of defining common elements among the various disciplines’ approaches to research ethics. This chapter provides a context for and an overview of principles developed by the Academy’s Working Group at the end of a series of s...

The aim of this concluding chapter is to address how we can build upon the efforts of the contributors to this collection to enable positive steps to be taken to advance morally sound research practice and quality research outcomes. The authors here have made contributions to the foundational work in research ethics and scientific integrity, and th...

Nowhere has the constant ‘reinvention of the wheel’ proved so problematic as in the field of research ethics and scientific integrity. Yet nowhere could it be more important. There is no need to search far to find ethics codes across disciplines that clearly borrow from each other without acknowledging sources. Researchers directed to a plethora of...

Over the past decade there has been growing national and international concern about the impact of systems for the management of research ethics in the social sciences. In particular these ‘procedural bureaucracies’ are seen as inappropriate to the ethical governance of social scientific research as they were designed around the challenges presente...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to offer insights into the personal experience of dealing with the progressive dementia of a close family member. Design/methodology/approach – Selected journal/diary entries over a ten-year period. Edited and anonymised. Findings – Even informed professionals with knowledge into the health and care system c...

Report commissioned by the Ethics Unit B6, DG Research and Innovation of the European Commission. The main audience for this Report are the members of ethics review panels who might not be so familiar with ethnographic research or qualitative research methods. Ethical review should be informed by the underlying theoretical and methodological assump...

The concern for evidence-based policymaking, alongside an interest in the measurement of ‘impact’ in the social sciences may task qualitative researchers more than most. Government commissioners, hankering after more ‘robust’ forms of causal explanation, have resuscitated interest in social experiments. But there are contrasting views about the eth...

Although the focus of much of ethical scrutiny and ethical decision-making relates to the minimisation of harm to research subjects, we sometimes do not think enough about how, by their more effective inclusion in research design, planning, data gathering, analysis and dissemination, they can participate more in the process and so contribute to the...

The notion that some subjects are deemed to be more vulnerable than others is, again, likely to be influenced by diverse cultural preconceptions and so regulated differentially by localised legislation. It is likely to be one of the areas where researchers need extra vigilance to ensure compliance with the local law.

Poorly designed research is inherently unethical since it wastes researchers’ and subjects’ time and energy if the results are less than useful. It may produce more disbenefits, such as a contamination of the field by discouraging participants from future research engagements, which may be of better quality. Concerns for quality represent an attent...

All human participant research interferes in some way with the lives of other human beings. Such interference may only amount to taking up an individual’s time — the ‘harm’ caused, at the very least, requires the subject to devote some of their precious time to an endeavour that was not freely chosen or instigated by them. That is, it is a sacrific...

The heart of ethical scrutiny is the attempt to balance the risk of harm against the potential for benefits that can accrue to individuals, groups, communities, organisations and even societies from research participation. Consideration has to be given to the different kinds of harm, the likelihood of their occurrence and the ways in which they can...

The monitoring of physical safety should not be separated from ethical scrutiny — any potential risks to safety need to be assessed and if researchers feel unsafe or anticipate risk of harm to themselves, this concern must be addressed. The safety both of participants and field researchers has to be monitored since there may be some mutual dependen...

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in ‘virtue’ ethics which expresses a concern for the characteristics of goodness seen to inhere in the individual (see Baggini and Fosl 2007: 94). So this chapter deals with the ‘virtues’ of the researcher. The virtuous researcher is someone the public, their colleagues and their funders can trus...

The relationship with research subjects must be carefully managed and controlled at each stage of the research process. This means thinking about how subjects are chosen and encouraged to join a research project, how they are encouraged to remain in the project for the duration and how their withdrawal from a project is facilitated. The key questio...

A practical simple definition of ethics is that they are ‘… a matter of principled sensitivity to the rights of others’ (Bulmer 1992). This means that behaving ethically requires careful consideration and regular attention whatever profession one practises. In recent years concerns have been heightened by a range of misbehaviours by those we believ...

There is a surprising range of ethical issues associated with the dissemination and reporting of project findings. It helps to think of this as a problem of how knowledge is managed and shared. The phrase currently employed for this is ‘knowledge transfer’. What new knowledge has been gained and what is the form and focus of dissemination — who is...

Given all the variable influences upon ethical decision-making, keeping the issues separate for purposes of analysis or review is almost impossible. This is illustrated most forcefully when addressing the means and methods for seeking consent from subjects to participate in research. The frequently used phrase ‘informed consent’ alone illustrates t...

In many respects the substance of this chapter represents the inspiration for this book. But it is only possible to fully address the issues associated with formal ethical review when all of the issues contained in the previous chapters have been covered. The steady growth of ethical scrutiny in social research became the motive for a fuller discus...

At the start of this book I likened the journey to a moral maze. The metaphor suggests that we could easily get ‘lost’ with so many decisions to take and potential wrong turns and dead ends. Elsewhere the analogy adopted was that of a minefield — with potentially explosive hidden dangers just waiting to destroy us. I hope that by this point in the...

As with all other elements in ethical decision-making there are tensions, conflicts and potential contradictions even in what appears at first sight to be an uncontentious area — that is, protecting the privacy of research subjects and keeping any information they provide as confidential. It is also here that the risks to a research organisation ar...

This book is a guide to ‘thinking through’ the problems of conducting ethical research in social science. Some moral problems are discussed, some dilemmas confronted and some possible solutions suggested drawing on a range of ‘real world’ case studies. The book is of practical help to researchers in resolving ethical dilemmas in research with human...

Research evidence suggests that a large number of individuals with substance misuse problems also have accompanying psychopathology. Some of those individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia may warrant a dual‐diagnosis. The clinical area of psychiatric ‘dual diagnosis' – that is, serious mental illness associated with substance misuse – is often link...

Working with people who misuse alcohol can be demanding and the costs to the National Health Service of dealing with harmful drinkers are acknowledged to be high. This article reinforces a view that the primary healthcare setting can be seen as a key area to influence the hazardous or harmful drinker's behaviour. It is argued that the Specialist Co...

This practical, user-friendly book is an invaluable guide to ethical decision-making in social research. Offering support and guidance throughout the research process - from designing research proposals and submitting them for ethical scrutiny to anticipating ethical dilemmas that might arise whilst research is being planned, conducted and reported...

This study explored the use of social comparison appraisals in adolescents' lives with particular reference to enhancement appraisals which can be used to counter threats to the self. Social comparison theory has been increasingly used in quantitative research to understand the processes through which societal messages about appearance influence ad...