Saturday, June 6, 2009

Ethics and bad research

Like “health and safety”, the phrase “research ethics” tends to elicit weary groans from many researchers. A full discussion is obviously out of place in this blog, but it seems obvious that research should not do actual harm without a very convincing argument. What I would like to focus on is whether bad research is ever ethical.
By bad research I mean research that is poorly thought out, where data cannot reliably support the sort of investigation for which they were collected. People have used up time, and costs incurred, for no benefit. In my view such research is always unethical, since its value (roughly zero) does not justify the trouble it has taken. It may cause actual harm, possibly even to the whole process of research, if enough people find it ridiculous. Future funding, or the cooperation of potential subjects, may be affected if research does not seem to be useful.
You therefore need to explain why your research really is useful, and why your subjects have to answer a long list of strange-looking questions. This explanation is for when you approach potential subjects, supervisors and sources of funding. You need to be open about what your research is about and what its expected benefits are. You must not use any deception in your approach to any of these people. Not can you say (yet) what the conclusions will be. Sometimes (rarely?) it will not be possible without compromising the research outcomes to tell your subjects what the hypothesis is, but you must be able to explain the expected area of benefit of the research and why they have been approached. Also, you should never collect data without discussing these aspects first.
An anecdote may help explain this point. Suppose you are at a management training course and you are given a set of objectives to prioritise. It is late in the day, and they all look important so you just take the first six and make up some spurious reasons for your choice. You could well be irritated if these priorities are fed back to senior management in your company – in two ways. Because your careless reasoning may be subjected to more scrutiny tan you would like, and this reflects badly on you. But more importantly, you fear that these may be the wrong priorities, and if you had known they would be used, you would have taken more care over them. Because of the careless way the data has been collected you do not know if your performance will be unfairly judged, or if the organisation will now change its behaviour as a result of bad data.
The selection of sources of data, whether from human subjects or more generally, requires the greatest care, and has been discussed in an earlier entry in this blog, as the chosen pattern will have a crucial bearing on the scope of validity of your conclusions. What data you collect, and how, will limit its interpretation, and this too has been discussed in the entry on research methodology. You probably won’t need to get ethical clearance unless your research involves living subjects, but the application you make before you start will provide a concise overview of the plan for your research and how the conclusions will be drawn. Even if you don’t need ethical clearance, you should protect your research by thinking these things out.

2 comments:

  1. What are your thoughts regarding data gathering agents?
    If they impact on performance should the user be told?
    When is the data gathered not generated, at some point, by a user command?

    Do computing scientist forget about the human element when considering ethics?

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  2. If data is gathered by an agent this would need to be part of the research methodology, and the likelihood that much of the data is spurious will need to be taken into account.

    Many computing scientists have in he past felt that ethics was not for them, and that their use of humans for testing was rather different from trying out a new surgical procedure on a human subject. But times change, and human factors are more commonly taken into account in computing, partly because of many softare failures that have occurred precisely because of human aspects. Also, there is a school of thought that some software is distressing or disorienting, and even that some games are harmful.

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