Reflection
The importance of ethics in research has caused many professional associations, government agencies, and research dependent institutions to come up with strict standards in fostering an ethical practice among members and affiliates. These are extensions to legal rules governing behavior and ethical norms.
Ethical actions can be legal or they can be illegal. When looking at an ethics problem, it is often necessary to pick a perspective that will help in the comprehension of the problem. Perspectives can be ecological, political, economic, or ethical.
In research, norms play a crucial role in defining and safeguarding ethical practices. They endorse the objectives of research, which can include verity and avoidance of error. Research should stay clear of fabricated processes and results.
It must be prone to moral conflicting circumstances because it is a process of cooperation and coordination with various people. Consequently, proper research that adheres to ethical standards must be fair, mutually respect researchers and participants, as well as practitioners, and show accountability (Hartman & DesJardins, 2014).
Three ethical failures
Soutphommasane (2014) gives an example of a research that aimed to evaluate the teachings of empathy in a medical school. The research was replicating conditions observed in America, in a group of participants in Britain. Conducted in 2009, the study wanted to see how students react when they are subject to discrimination.
However, for it to work, it demanded that participants assume certain stereotypical, racial norms, such as viewing all white people as racist. There was uproar among participants. Many objected to the identification of people against their identities or their personal preferences.
Many of the participants expressed concern that the researchers were exceeding the limits of moral inquiry. The value of the experiment was dismissed on ethical grounds. It was not appropriate for the researchers to subject participants to actual feelings of racism, as either victims or perpetrators.
It caused the research subjects to do something against their will, thus the research failed to move past the data collection exercise. A second example of ethical failure by researchers comes from a report by Tabor (2014) about a nurse who coached people to die.
First, researchers must understand that life is sacred and there is an ongoing debate on the morality of assisted death. In this case, Judith Schwarz, who was a veteran nurse, researched on what patients had done to end their lives and then made unsolicited experiments on the method of providing alternative ways to die.
Her patients trusted her by the virtue of being a veteran nurse. However, the patients did not know that they were subjects of an ongoing research that the nurse was doing on voluntary death by starvation. Here, the nurse provided an essential service of assisted death to needy patients, but she crossed the line held by many practitioners on the morality of assisted death.
Interestingly, the practice was a product of a dissertation on self-dehydration that she had conducted. The problem is that some patients are diagnosed with terminal illness, but they have years to live and there is no apparent body governing the procedures of the research.
A third example is by Cressey (2013), who reports about the exposure of hundreds of patients to potential harm as they take part in clinical trials. Researchers working on treatment trials release the findings, but only those that support a given treatment are supported and published.
Consequently, many research papers can demonstrate the failures of trial medications, but they do not feature anywhere for future researchers to consult. The report by Cressey (2013) refers to the problem as a failure to honor the ethical contract.
Patients have a right to know that there are potential dangers in their use of unconfirmed medications. One ethical obligation of researchers is to publish their findings so that participants are aware of what took place during the study and why it took place. Failure to release findings is akin to robbing the study’s utility that those who joined were hoping to gain.
References
Cressey, D. (2013). ‘Ethical failure’ leaves one-quarter of all clinical trials unpublished. Web.
Hartman, L. P., & DesJardins, J. (2014). Business ethics, decision-making for personal integrity and social responsibility (3rd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
Soutphommasane, T. (2014). Walk in another’s shoes? Reflections on empathy power and priviledge. ABC. Web.
Tabor, N. (2014). The nurse coaching people through death by starvation. The Daily Beast. Web.