Ethical Research Practice
An Introduction

An essential aspect of all research is the maintenance of ethical behaviour – in approach, procedures and analysis.  This introduction provides a summary of the issues involved in ethical research practice. Carrying out comparative socio-economic research in a professional and ethical manner involves balancing a number of different, often contradictory, principles.

Why Be Concerned abut Ethics in Research provides a summary of the issues involved in ethical research practice, review of the controls already existing and the basic principles underlying them. 

For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Taylor: Ethical Considerations In European Cross National Research

Summaries of Existing Codes of Ethics and Good Practice more...
Short summaries of the key and relevant features of various existing ethical codes for relevant organisations. 

Codes of Ethics more...
Links to Codes of Ethics and Guidelines

As ethical research considerations are closely linked to data protection and confidentiality issues, please see also Data Protection and the report on the NESSIE Roundtable 3 which focussed on these issues.

Other sites
There are several other sites which provide a wide-ranging introduction to, and discussion of, the issues involved in maintaining ethics and good practice in social science research:

The RESPECT project was funded by the European Commission’s Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme, to draw up professional and ethical guidelines for the conduct of social research and has produced a Code of Practice.  This code is intended to form the basis of a voluntary code of practice covering the conduct of socio-economic research in Europe.

The Research Ethics Framework Project which was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to undertake the Development of a Framework for Social Science Research Ethics.  Click here for a background paper describing the rationale for the project and the details of the Framework.

In addition, an ARCISS/SRA Seminar on Current developments in Social Science Research Ethics Policy Studies Institute, 23 January 2004 reports on a seminar which presents a stocktaking of current practices in the research community, presents some current initiatives to develop new codes, procedures or frameworks and presents a discussion of issues of concern to practising researchers