Examine the ways in which ethical issues are relevant to sociological research
Ethical issues are moral concerns about the benefits and potential harm of research to the people being researched , to researchers themselves and society. This essay will be examining the ways in which ethical issues are relevant to sociological research.
Ethics are common set of values upon which sociologists build their work, they provide principles and rules to cover professional situations. The first ethical issue relates to the decision about what to study by choosing a certain area the researchers might be confirming some peoples prejudice about a particular issue , for example many sociologists are concerned about the extent of research into the ‘ negative’ side of African- Caribbean life which studies on school failure, lower levels of job success , by merely studying this a continued association is made between race and criminality, this can be a very sensitive subject so sociologists have to be very careful . Access to particular groups can be hard , the more powerful the group the harder it is and less likely the members will agree especially to things such as qualitative methods like interviews. The less powerful groups such as students , petty criminals ,are usually easy to research however not having access to the powerful groups will mean quantitative data such as statistics will not be exact. Subjects may be harmed by an experiment, in participant observational studies , where the researcher joins in they may influence the members to behave in a certain and not what they would normally do in that situation. Families can be affected by the research , they may have information given about them that they wish to keep secret , victims of crime may be upset by the information that researches obtain about the perpetrators , as they want to forget about the incident. This essay has shown that sociologists strive to advance the science of sociology but to also...