ETHICAL ISSUES IN SOCIAL RESEARCH
    Voluntary Participation
    No Harm to the Participants
    Anonymity and Confidentiality
    Deceiving Subjects
    Analysis and Reporting
    Institutional Review Boards
    A Professional Code of Ethics

    As your've seen so far in the book, social research is conducted in accord with a number of scientific principles and established procedures.  At the same time, it is also constrained by ethical considerations, and this chapter will address those.  We'll see that participation in research projects must be voluntary and cannot harm the participants.  Anything participants reveal about themselves must be kept confidential, and data are often collected in an anonymous fashion that further guards against violating their privacy.  While these principles and the others we'll examine may seem obvious to you, we'll see that each is more complex in practice than might appear the case, and each is surrounded by a gray area that requires more than a mere knee-jerk compliance by researchers.

    This section will also introduce you to some of the institutional supports for research ethics.  Institutional revew boards at universities, for example, oversee review proposed projects to insure ethicality.  And professional associations, such as the American Sociological Association or American Association for Public Opinion Research have codes of ethics that members are expected to uphold.

    Please realize that ethical considerations are an essential part of social research, not just a nice-sounding afterthought.