ETHICS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

Ethics in Social Science

Ethics in Social Science

In general, sociology and psychology investigations have been considered to pose low risk to the subjects and, therefore, with less need of analysis by ethical review committees. This assessment is inadequate.

In all scientific studies there are ethical dilemmas. In the social sciences they adopt different forms manifested in the interrogations about what to prioritize at the moment of selecting a topic of investigation, in which way to be carried out, what to publish, considering furthermore the relevance of the problem for the community.

On that note, one should question everything from the research design, evaluating the method and the techniques that are used in the pursuit of the objectives, to the impacts of the study for the scientific and social community. Therefore, the interpretation of the information obtained is of utmost importance since, depending on that, one can or cannot apply policies of social intervention that have an impact on the life of the people.

It is interesting to emphasize that the dissemination of information has frequently been a topic of great interest and ethical debate, since it involves confidentiality but also there is need to publish and disseminate. It is a matter of determining how to recognize the work and the contributions of others, the intellectual honesty and the responsibility that the results of the study are utilized in order to better society (in our case, for example, in the formulation of public policies in distinct sectors).

Samples of the population are selected to find the incidence, distribution and relative interrelations among social and psychological variables. Additionally, findings can be achieved through personal structured interviews, that is to say, by means of questions whose sequence and composition are fixed. In the ecological studies the unit of analysis is a group rather than an individual.

Systematic reviews: They try to compile and analyze all the available information in all the biomedical or psychosocial literature about a given problem. The collected data can be analyzed with statistical methods. They are called meta analysis when, with statistical methods, results from different publications are analyzed in a joint form.

Precisely in the qualitative analysis, one expects comprehension of the problem of investigation in inductive form, through their own actors, with interpretive singularity and flexibility of approaches, without delimiting reality, rather better situating it in a particular context (2).

Another important aspect of the qualitative investigation is the reflexive position, that is to say, the investigator and the object of study are affected and both are part of the process of investigation, they are not considered as independents (3), but they are social actors that create the process of investigation from interpretation, in a historical and social context which includes race, sex, class, etc.

Additionally, the qualitative focus has critical and reversible capacity. Critical, given that it is not a matter of rigid sequence: the investigation is a process of construction; and reversible, since the methodological sequence is enriched throughout the same process (6).

In this way, the investigations with this methodological focus are ...