Ethical Issues in Relationship Research

To advance the human sciences, researchers invariably need human subjects or participants. However, a balance must exist between the rewards in knowledge gained from the research and the potential costs to the research participants. To minimize these costs, researchers must attend to ethical issues related to research using human beings. This has not always been the case, however; only in the last 60 years has there been an ongoing commitment by researchers using human beings to treat their participants ethically. And the burgeoning interest in scientific research on human relationships brings new ethical challenges. This entry describes the history of ethics in human research, identifies the fundamental principles that guide research involving human participants, and discusses some specific ethical issues of which relationship researchers need to be particularly aware.

Several specific historical events, involving both human medical research and social science research have led to the more ethical treatment of human subjects. The Nazi medical experiments involved research by German doctors on concentration camp prisoners during World War II that was so extreme and detrimental to the participants that the experiments were depicted as crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. Subjects in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital Study, and the Willow-brook Study were either infected with disease or denied treatment, all with detrimental effects on their health. The Stanford Prison Experiment and the Obedience to Authority Studies were psychological science research examining authority issues. In both studies, the participants were placed in situations involving behaviors that led, for some, to extreme emotional distress during the experiment, as well as to long-term trauma.

As a result of these and other studies, changes occurred in the way in which human experimentation could proceed. In 1979, the Belmont Report, written by a commission established by the U.S. Congress, established three basic ethical research principles: (1) autonomy/respect (people have the right to decide whether to participate in a study as well as to withdraw without penalty), (2) beneficence (participants should understand the risks of participation and any harm should be minimized), and (3) justice (people will not be unfairly singled out to participate because of race, sex, age, or other factors without good reason). To successfully address these principles, researchers also needed to (a) receive informed consent, (b) conduct risk-benefit assessment, and (c) establish fair procedures in the selection of research subjects. Following the Belmont Report, the American Psychological Association provided specific ethical principles and codes of conduct for psychological experiments, including how to plan research, the responsibility of the experimenter, compliance with laws and standards, informed consent, the proper use of deception in research, minimizing invasiveness, and providing participants with information about the study. As such, most, if not all, colleges and universities currently have institutional review boards that provide guidance, as well as approval, for all research involving human subjects.

Ensuring ethics in relationship research poses particular challenges because of the difference between studying human relationships and studying human beings. For example, relationship research, by its very nature, involves studying multiple persons rather than single individuals; as such, the relational system must be taken into account. As defined by the Belmont Report, however, it is individuals who are treated as autonomous agents and who give their informed consent to participate. The principle of autonomy and respect and the requirement of informed consent become problematic when one is studying families, couples, or friendships rather than single persons. For example, when doing research on family relationships, how does one protect the autonomy, and respect the privacy, of persons not involved in the research (e.g., family members, spouses, or friends) about whom participants might disclose to the researcher sensitive or damaging information? Similarly, because the relationship itself is of [Page 540]interest, how does one negate, or account for, the impact that any one person participating in the research might have on the overall family or marriage? It is not just the benefits and costs of the individual that must be weighed in a risk-benefit assessment, but the impact of the research on other people involved in the relationship, whether or not they are research participants.

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