Ethical Issues at Each Research Stage
Eleven issues, two stages, three right-holders. Sort them by whose right is in play and the pattern is stark: the proposal stage is almost entirely about the person paying, and participants do not appear until the design.
Two stages, eleven issues
The supplied teaching source introduces the material with a single sentence and then gives two lists. The sentence matters, because it sets the status of everything that follows.
Research proposal stage
- Disclosure of who is financing your research — the slide adds the qualifier "if relevant"
- Sponsor's right to quality research and your effort to provide it
- Sponsor's right to nondisclosure of your findings — appears in the slide deck only, not in the study notes
- Your right as a researcher to be free from coercion from the sponsor in undertaking your study and determining your results
- Your right to honest dealings with the sponsor
Research design stage
- Participants' right of informed consent
- Researcher's right to safety
- Participants' right to privacy
- Participants' right to volunteer and not to be coerced
- Participants' right to confidentiality
- Sponsor's right to have unbiased and quality research
Whose right is in play
Almost every item on both lists is phrased as somebody's right. That is not decoration. A right names a holder, and a holder is a person or party you can identify, consult and be answerable to — which turns an abstract list into a set of relationships you have to manage.
THE ELEVEN ISSUES BY RIGHT-HOLDER
| Issue, as the source states it | Stage | Whose right | What it obliges you to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disclosure of who is financing your research | Proposal | Not stated | Say who is paying. The source does not say who the disclosure is owed to, and the slide adds "if relevant" while the notes do not qualify it. |
| Sponsor's right to quality research and your effort to provide it | Proposal | Sponsor | Design something actually capable of answering the question, and put the work in. Quality is framed here as an entitlement, not an aspiration. |
| Sponsor's right to nondisclosure of your findings | Proposal | Sponsor | Slide deck only. See the discrepancy section below before you accept any such term. |
| Your right to be free from coercion from the sponsor in undertaking your study and determining your results | Proposal | Researcher | Settle in advance who decides what the study concludes. The right covers both how the work is run and what it says at the end. |
| Your right to honest dealings with the sponsor | Proposal | Researcher | Phrased as your right, so the entitlement runs towards you: you are owed honest dealing, not only obliged to provide it. |
| Participants' right of informed consent | Design | Participant | Build the information and consent mechanism into the design, not into a form you write afterwards. |
| Researcher's right to safety | Design | Researcher | Assess your own exposure — site visits, lone interviews, hostile subject matter — and say how it will be managed. |
| Participants' right to privacy | Design | Participant | Decide what will be collected about a person and what will not, before you can be tempted by what is available. |
| Participants' right to volunteer and not to be coerced | Design | Participant | Design the approach so that refusal costs nothing, which is difficult and sometimes impossible inside a reporting line. |
| Participants' right to confidentiality | Design | Participant | Decide at design stage who will see what, including during analysis and at reporting — not only after collection. |
| Sponsor's right to have unbiased and quality research | Design | Sponsor | The one item that appears at both stages. It is a promise at proposal and a property of the method at design. |
Column one reproduces the source's wording. Columns three and four are analysis added here; the source lists the issues without allocating them or explaining them.
The proposal stage is about the person paying
Every single proposal-stage issue concerns money or the relationship with whoever provides it. No participant appears at this stage at all, and neither does harm, consent or privacy.
That is not an oversight. At proposal stage you have not approached anybody. What you have done is make commitments to a funder — about what you will look at, what you will produce and who will control it — and those are the commitments that are hardest to unwind once collection has started.
Three things to settle before the proposal is signed off
Who is financing this
The first item on the list. In a workplace study the financier is often invisible because it is your employer absorbing your time, which is exactly the case where disclosure gets skipped. Write it down even when it feels obvious.
Who determines the results
Your stated right is freedom from coercion in both undertaking the study and determining its results. Two separate freedoms, and the second is the one that comes under pressure at the end. Agreed in writing at proposal stage it is a term; raised at findings stage it is a dispute.
What each side owes the other
The sponsor is owed quality research and your genuine effort. You are owed honest dealings. Both appear on the same list, at the same stage, which frames the relationship as mutual rather than as a service arrangement. See Sponsors and Researcher Independence.
None of this is separable from how the proposal is written. The document that records your aims, design and ethical thinking is the same document these commitments live in — see The Purpose of a Research Proposal.
The nondisclosure discrepancy
There is a distinction worth drawing that the source itself supports elsewhere, even though it never applies it here. The surrounding material states plainly that many sponsors wish to conduct research without revealing themselves and that sponsors have a right to demand a confidential relationship with the researcher. That is nondisclosure of the sponsor's identity.
Nondisclosure of your findings is a different thing entirely. One conceals who commissioned the work; the other conceals what the work found. Only the first has clear support in the rest of the supplied material.
The design stage is where participants appear
Four of the six design-stage issues are participants' rights. The remaining two are the researcher's own safety and, again, the sponsor's entitlement to unbiased and quality research — the only item the source lists at both stages.
Participants' rights — four of six
- Right of informed consent
- Right to privacy
- Right to volunteer and not to be coerced
- Right to confidentiality
The other two
- Researcher's right to safety
- Sponsor's right to unbiased and quality research
Count the five named harms. Only two of them — physical harm and pain — are the kind a project management study is unlikely to cause. Discomfort, embarrassment and loss of privacy are exactly what a study of decision-making, performance or failure inside an organisation produces, and they are named in the rule with equal weight.
Embarrassment in particular is worth sitting with. An interview about why a project overran is an invitation to a participant to describe their own decisions to someone who will write them down. The mechanics of consent and of protecting identity are covered in Voluntary Participation and Informed Consent and Confidentiality and Anonymity; the harm question itself is in Protecting Participants from Harm.
The item most often skipped is the researcher's own safety. It is in the design list, and it reappears as a required section of the ethics application, which asks you to indicate how any safety implications for yourself beyond those normally encountered in everyday life will be addressed. Site visits, night-shift observation and lone interviews with people discussing a dispute all belong there — see Writing an Ethics Application.
The four stages the source never reaches
The material that does exist for those stages is scattered across other parts of the same source. The table below shows where to find it and what remains missing.
THE UNCOVERED STAGES AND WHERE THE MATERIAL ACTUALLY IS
| Stage with no list | Where the same source touches it anyway | What is still missing |
|---|---|---|
| Data collection | The principles of do no harm and free choice, and the consent and recruitment sections of the ethics application structure | Anything about what happens when consent is withdrawn mid-study, or when something unexpected is disclosed during collection |
| Analysis | One unanswered question: whether pre-designed variables may be dropped after data collection because they produced insignificant results | Any guidance at all. This is the thinnest stage in the material — a question is posed and no answer is given anywhere |
| Reporting | The plagiarism principle, and "misrepresenting the results" in the list of unethical behaviours | How to report a finding that damages the sponsor or identifies a participant, which is where reporting ethics actually bites |
| Archiving | The data recording and storage section of the ethics application, which carries the only hard requirements in the whole teaching source | Nothing substantial. This is the best-covered of the four |
Working the eleven into your own project
Run the list twice, at the two moments the source names. The proposal pass is a negotiation with a funder; the design pass is an engineering exercise on the method. They are not the same activity and doing them together tends to mean neither gets done.
Proposal pass — before anything is signed
- Who is financing the study is written down, including where the finance is absorbed staff time
- The sponsor's expectation of quality is stated in terms you can actually meet
- Who determines the findings is agreed in writing, and it is you
- Any nondisclosure term distinguishes identity from findings, and you have read what it does to your examination
- You can state what you are owed by the sponsor, not only what you owe them
Design pass — before the method is fixed
- The consent mechanism is part of the method, not a form written afterwards
- You have listed what will be collected about each person and what will deliberately not be
- Refusal to participate has been designed to cost nothing, and you can say how
- Who sees identifiable material is decided for collection, analysis and reporting separately
- Your own safety exposure is assessed and the response written down
- Each of the five named harms — physical harm, discomfort, pain, embarrassment, loss of privacy — has been considered against your actual instrument
The design pass belongs inside the design work itself rather than after it, for the same reason the source puts it there: a method settled first and made ethical afterwards usually has to be rebuilt. See Step 5: Designing Your Research.
What to carry forward
- Proposal-stage ethics is entirely about money and the sponsor relationship. No participant appears until the design stage.
- Your right to be free from coercion covers both how the study runs and what it concludes. The second is the one that comes under pressure.
- A sponsor's right to nondisclosure of findings appears on the slides only, and contradicts your right to determine your results. Settle publication terms in writing before collection.
- Three of the five named harms are not physical: discomfort, embarrassment and loss of privacy. Those are the ones an organisational study actually causes.
- The researcher's own safety is on the design list and in the application. Do not skip it because your fieldwork is office-based.
- Only two stages are covered. Collection, analysis, reporting and archiving need material from elsewhere — and analysis is the thinnest of all.
Frequently asked questions
Why does the proposal stage have no participant issues at all?
Because at proposal stage you have not approached anyone. All five items concern financing, the sponsor's entitlements and your independence from them. The practical implication is that the commitments hardest to unwind — who decides the findings, what may be withheld — are made before a single participant has been asked anything.
Which list should I trust on the sponsor's right to nondisclosure?
The item appears in the slide deck and not in the study notes, and the source does not resolve the difference. Because it contradicts your own listed right to determine your results free of sponsor coercion, treat it as a term to negotiate explicitly rather than a rule to accept. Distinguish nondisclosure of the sponsor's identity, which the surrounding material does support, from nondisclosure of your findings, which it does not.
Does the design stage list apply if I am only using existing organisational records?
Privacy and confidentiality plainly do, since records about identifiable people carry both. Consent and the right to volunteer are harder, because the people in the records never agreed to anything. The source does not address records-based research separately, so this is a question for your approving body rather than one the material answers.
What counts as a safety issue for the researcher in a project management study?
The application form's test is anything beyond what is normally encountered in everyday life. In practice that covers site and plant visits, lone interviews conducted off-hours or off-site, and interviews about live disputes, failures or misconduct where a participant may react badly. Office-based interviewing during business hours will usually fall below the threshold, but the assessment still has to be made and recorded.
What are the ethical issues at analysis stage?
The supplied source gives none. It poses one question — whether pre-designed variables may be dropped after data collection because they produced insignificant results — and never answers it, anywhere in the material. Analysis is the thinnest stage in the entire teaching source, and anything you need on it has to come from your institution's research conduct policy.
How long do I have to keep the data?
The source states a minimum of five years, stored securely in a safe environment, as a requirement flowing from the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. It notes variations — a project involving a South Australian government department requires a minimum of seven years. These are stated requirements rather than illustrations, although the code itself is not reproduced in the teaching material.
References and source attribution
- Cooper, D. & Schindler, P. 2008, Business Research Methods, 10th ed., McGraw-Hill — the text the supplied source draws on for ethical issues in the sponsor relationship.
- Quinlan, C. 2011, Business Research Methods, 1st ed., Cengage Publishing, Chapter 3 — the prescribed reading accompanying the ethics material.
- Swinton, J. 2009, 'Why bother with research ethics?', Journal of Community Nursing, vol. 23, no. 9, pp. 25–27.
- Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (2007) — named in the supplied source as the instrument behind its data storage, retention and research practice requirements. The code itself is not reproduced in the supplied material.
- The supplied teaching source: consolidated weekly teaching notes and slide material on research ethics, which supplies the two stage lists quoted on this page, the harm rule, and the slide-only nondisclosure item.
Suggested questions for Ask KEVOS
- Sort the ethical issues in my study by right-holder and tell me which ones I can negotiate.
- My sponsor wants approval rights over the findings. Draft the questions I should put in writing before I agree.
- Assess my design against the five named harms — physical harm, discomfort, pain, embarrassment, loss of privacy.
- What are my own safety exposures in a study involving site visits and interviews about a live dispute?
- The source covers no ethical issues at analysis stage. What should I put in my proposal to cover it?