Skip to 0 minutes and 6 seconds This course is for anybody interested in people studying people. So our definition of research would be that you’re collecting data on one another and thinking throughout how that’s going to be used and reported. It’s our view that research ethics, or ethics in general, are of fundamental importance in any type of research activity. We all have experiences as citizens, really, of volunteering our data for research purposes. If you think about market research, or assigning of data agreement, you are actually involved in the transaction of your own personal data.
Skip to 0 minutes and 45 seconds We’re going to start by presenting a number of case studies of things that have been in the news– people’s research projects that they’re going to the talking about– to give us some very concrete examples of things that you can think about, and then work through a framework of four different dimensions, four different traditions of thinking about ethics, which allows you to think from different perspectives of people who would be associated with research– to think through and get some empathy for how they would think about the research, their needs, and therefore, how you would go back showing respect to them.
Skip to 1 minute and 16 seconds For a researcher, you have a responsibility, primarily to your main research participants, to treat them in a fair and reasonable way. Beyond our immediate research participants, we also have responsibilities to the broader research community and to society in general, who clearly, everybody has an interest in good, ethically sound research. This is a course that would be of interest, hopefully, to people who are thinking about data from a participant’s point of view, perhaps. So they’ve read about research studies, seen research studies on the news, been asked about it, and starting to think about– well, in what circumstances would I give my data– and thinking through research from that perspective.
Skip to 2 minutes and 2 seconds But also, if you’ve got a very concrete research proposal idea, this will offer you a framework– those moral principles that you can use to underpin your study to make sure that it’s a worthwhile study– that you are acting responsibly, that you’re able to think through practically about how to be respectful, and that you can end up with a project proposal, or even evaluating a study that you’ve got in motion at the moment, and really feeling confident that it’s an ethical project that you can defend.
