Social Research Design Week 14: Ethics and Politics

Overview of the Chapter

    Welcome to Week 14 of Sociology 201 online.  In this unit of the course, we are going to focus on the ethical and political constraints within which social research functions.

    The discussions and activities of this unit are linked to Chapter 3 of The Practice of Social Research. To preview the topics contained in Chapter 3, click here.  You can click on any of the major headings for a brief overview of that topic.  You might want to read the overview prior to reading that section of the chapter and/or read the overview after the chapter to make sure you got what you were supposed to get from it.

    Your tasks for completing this unit of the course are to:

(1) Preview and read Chapter 3,
(2) View the presentations provided below, and

Your mother probably told you that lying was wrong, and social researchers were taught the same thing by their mothers.  However, deception often seems indispensible in social research.  Click here for an example.

Ethical issues are seldom open and shut matters, but require deliberation and often produce disagreement among basically ethical people.  Click here for some discussion examples of research ethics.

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