Ethics and Deviance Research

The role of the researcher is to understand people and events happening around the world. Correct information comes from collecting accurate data from subjects and analyzing it scientifically. Certain undesirable issues in this process necessitated the development of relevant ethical principles in conducting research. Most notoriously, physicians under the Nazi regime conducted numerous harmful and often lethal medical experiments on prisoners in concentration camps against the will of the participants. In another egregious case, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which began in 1932, an effective treatment discovered in the 1940s was deliberately withheld from hundreds of African American patients infected with syphilis so that scientists could continue to study the long-term course of the disease over the following decades.

After World War II, an international war crimes tribunal delivered its judgment against the doctors who had performed unethical experiments on prisoners in German concentration camps. Known as the Nuremberg Code, these principles are considered to be the first international ethical code in scientific experimentation. The Declaration of Helsinki and The Common Rule are also significant documents relating to ethical principles for the protection of human subjects in research. In the United States, the federal Office for Human Research Protections was established after the existence of the Tuskegee study became public knowledge in the 1970s.

[Page 258]Today, many different disciplines that use human beings as subjects in scientific research have their own ethical codes that researchers are expected to follow (e.g., The American Psychological Association's Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, The American Sociological Association Code of Ethics, The American Anthropological Association's Code of Ethics, and The American Educational Research Association Ethical Standards). In the United States, universities and many scientific research organizations have institutional review boards. The role of the institutional review board is to protect subjects, researchers, and institutions. Even though almost all fields have their own codes of ethics, and no single declaration or set of rules can successfully and fully be applicable for every discipline of social sciences, there are mandatory ethical principles that all researchers must consider in research that involves human subjects.

Among the ethical principles embodied in the Nuremberg Code are those of informed consent, voluntary participation, and avoidance of physical and psychological harm to participants. Ethical issues in a research design cover all research from the beginning (i.e., the problem statement) to the end (i.e., disseminating the research) and should be considered in every stage of research design.