Question

Consider one of the following ethical dilemmas that may face a researcher. Describe ways you might anticipate the problem and actively address it in your research proposal. What boundaries must researchers work within and who sets them?

1. A prisoner you are interviewing tells you about a potential breakout at the prison that night. What do you do?

2. A researcher on your team copies sentences from another study and incorporates them into the final written report for your project. What do you do?

3. A student collects data for her project from several individuals she has interviewed I families in your city. After the fourth interview, she tells you that she has not received approval for the project from the Institutional Review Board. What do you do?

Answer 1

2. I would not accept the researcher's work where he/she has copied the sentences from another study into my written report for the project. I will tell the researcher that this is against the ethical standards of our research and could lead to plagiarism, and it cannot be part of our research report. Instead, i will ask the researcher to incorporate original work in the written report after removal of the copied sentences from the report. I will also warn the researcher to not indulge in such a practice in the future as it is fraud.