ETHICS IN BUSINESS

RESEARCH
Submitted by,
Section C, Group 8
Baritto Paulson - CB.BU.P2MBA19045
Kavya G - CB.BU.P2MBA19078
Pratheek Shetty - CB.BU.P2MBA19114
Sreelakshmi V - CB.BU.P2MBA19156
Vaisakh MP -CB.BU.P2MBA19171
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Contents

1. What is research ethics?

2. Ethical treatment of participants
3. Ethics and sponsor
4. Researchers and team members - Safety, Ethical Behavior of assistants, Protection of
Anonymity
5. Professional standards
6. Resources for ethical awareness

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1. What Are Research Ethics?
Ethics are norms or standards of behavior that guide moral choices about our behavior and our
relationships with others.

The goal of ethics in research is to ensure that no one is harmed or suffers adverse consequences
from research activities.

Unethical activities are pervasive and include violating non disclosure agreements, breaking
participant confidentiality, misrepresenting results, deceiving people, using invoicing irregularities,
avoiding legal liability, and more.

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2. Ethical Treatment Of Participants
Research must be designed so that a particular participant does not suffer physical harm, discomfort,
pain, embarrassment, or loss of privacy. To safeguard against these, the researcher should follow the
three guidelines:

1. Explain study benefits

2. Explain participant rights and protections
3. Obtain informed consent

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2.1 Benefits

Whenever direct contact is made with a participant, the researcher should discuss the study’s
benefits, being careful to neither overstate nor understate the benefits.

● An interviewer should begin an introduction with his or her name, the name of the research
organization, and a brief description of the purpose and benefit of the research.
● Inducements to participate, financial or otherwise, should not be disproportionate to the
task or presented in a fashion that results in coercion.
● Sometimes the actual purpose and benefits of your study or experiment must be concealed
from the participants to avoid introducing bias.

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2.2 Deception

Deception occurs when the participants are told only part of the truth or when the truth is fully
compromised. Experts suggest two reasons for deception:

1. To prevent biasing the participants before the survey or experiment

2. To protect the confidentiality of a third party (e.g., the sponsor).
● Deception should not be used in an attempt to improve response rates.
● The benefits to be gained by deception should be balanced against the risks to the
participants.
● The participants’ rights and well-being must be adequately protected.
● In instances where deception in an experiment could produce anxiety, a subject’s medical
condition should be checked to ensure that no adverse physical harm follows.

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2.3 Informed Consent

Securing informed consent from participants is a matter of fully disclosing the procedures of the
proposed survey or other research design before requesting permission to proceed with the
study.

● When dealing with children, the researcher is wise to have a parent or other person with
legal standing sign a consent form.
● When doing research with medical or psychological ramifications, the researcher is also
wise to obtain a signed consent form.
● For most business research, oral consent is sufficient.

In situations where participants are intentionally or accidentally deceived, they should be

debriefed once the research is complete.

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2.4 Debriefing Participants
Debriefing involves several activities following the collection of data:

● Explanation of any deception.

● Description of the hypothesis, goal, or purpose of the study.
● Poststudy sharing of results.
● Poststudy follow-up medical or psychological attention.

2.5 Rights To Privacy

The researcher protects participant confidentiality in several ways:

• Obtaining signed nondisclosure documents.

• Restricting access to participant identification.
• Revealing participant information only with written consent.
• Restricting access to data instruments where the participant is identified.
• Not disclosing data subsets.
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 3. Ethics and the Sponsor
● Confidentiality

Sponsors have a right to several types of confidentiality, and those are the following :

(a) Sponsor nondisclosure : Companies have a right to dissociate themselves from the sponsorship
of a research project.nondisclosure. Due to the sensitive nature of the management dilemma or
the research question, sponsors may hire an outside consulting or research firm to complete
research projects.

(b) Purpose nondisclosure : Involves protecting the purpose of the study or its details. A research
sponsor may be testing a new idea that is not yet patented and may not want the competition to
know of its plans.

(c) (c) Finding nondisclosure : Even if a sponsor feels no need to hide its identity or the study’s
purpose, most sponsors want the research data and findings to be confidential, at least until the
management decision is made. 9
 3. Ethics and the Sponsor
● Sponsor - Researcher relationship

An effective sponsor–researcher relationship is not achieved unless both fulfill their respective
obligations and several critical barriers are overcome.The obligations of managers are to specify their
problems and provide researchers with adequate background information and access to company
information gatekeepers.The obligation of researcher to develop a creative research design that will
provide answers to important business questions.If this is done, both manager and researcher can
jointly decide what information is needed. In the process some conflicts may occur such as :

(a) Knowledge gap between the researcher and the manager: Managers seldom have either formal
training in research methodology, the various aspects of research ethics, or research expertise
gained through experience. And, due to the explosive growth of research technology in recent years,
a knowledge gap has developed between managers and research specialists as more sophisticated
investigative techniques have come into use. 10
 3. Ethics and the Sponsor
(b) Job status and internal, political coalitions to preserve status: Managers often see research people as
threats to their personal status. Managers still view management as the domain of the “intuitive artist” who
is the master in this area. They may believe a request for research assistance implies they are inadequate to
the task.Coalitions form and people engage in various self-serving activities, both overt and covert. As a
result, research is blocked, or the findings or objectives of the research are distorted for an individual’s self-
serving purposes.

(c) Unneeded or inappropriate research: If a study does not help management select more efficient, less
risky, or more profitable alternatives than otherwise would be the case, the researcher has an ethical
responsibility to question its use.

(d) The right to quality research: The sponsor’s right to quality research entails:Providing a research
design appropriate for the research question,maximizing the sponsor’s value for the resources
expended,providing data-handling and data-reporting techniques appropriate for the data collected.The
ethical researcher always follows the analytical rules and conditions for results to be correct and reports
findings in ways that minimize the drawing of false conclusions. 11
 3. Ethics and the Sponsor
● Sponsor Ethics:
A sponsor may offer a promotion, future contracts, or a larger payment for the existing research contract;
or the sponsor may threaten to fire the researcher or tarnish the researcher’s reputation and for some
researchers, the request may seem trivial and the reward high.

The following are some of the examples that need to be avoided:

(a) Violating participant confidentiality
(b) Changing data or creating false data to meet a desired objective.
(c) Changing data presentations or interpretations.
(d) Interpreting data from a biased perspective.
(e) Omitting sections of data analysis and conclusions
(f) Making recommendations beyond the scope of the data collected.

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 3. Ethics and the Sponsor
The ethical course requires confronting the sponsor’s demand and taking the following actions:

• Educate the sponsor to the purpose of research.

• Explain the researcher’s role in fact finding versus the sponsor’s role in decision making.

• Explain how distorting the truth or breaking faith with participants leads to future problems.

• Failing moral suasion, terminate the relationship with the sponsor.

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4. Researchers and Team Members -
Safety
Safety is a very crucial part of research ethics, it helps in setting up boundaries and Limitations on
how to conduct the business within their preview. This also helps in ensuring that the business is
conducted in a norms of legal formalities.

● Researcher emotional safety

Research team members will have a range of skills for coping effectively with emotionally
distressing experiences that arise during research. These will be determined by their disciplinary
background, professional and personal experience, and each individual’s own psychological
characteristics.

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 4. Researchers and Team Members -
Safety
● Physical safety

Although it is rare for the physical safety of researchers to be compromised, there is also likely to
be an impact on researchers’ emotional safety if their physical safety is breached. Reasonable
steps can be taken to avoid these risks by planning actions to promote safety for researchers.

Qualitative methods have contributed to primary care greatly over the past two decades,
providing greater insights into health care professionals’ and patients’ experiences. In providing
these it is important to care for the health and wellbeing of researchers in the field and the
participants in research.

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 4. Ethical Behaviour of Assistants
Ethics is an integral component of research training. Across disciplines, research supervisor and
research assistant (RA) may converse about ethical issues such as scientific misconduct,
authorship, and conflict of interest.

Specifically, the discussions involve the key principle guiding human research, which is that the
potential benefits of research must prevail over the potential risks to the human participant.

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4. Protection of Anonymity

● Anonymous communication has an important place in political and social discourse and is effective
in promoting freedom of expression.
● Anonymity refers to collecting data without obtaining any personal, identifying information.
Typically, it is the procedure followed in quantitative studies.
● The chief way to do this is through the process of anonymisation.
● Ethical guidelines and methods textbooks all note the importance of anonymising through the use
of pseudonyms.
● In these circumstances, researchers are advised to obtain written consent that an individual wishes to
waive their right to confidentiality. This indicates that anonymity through the use of pseudonyms is still
the norm.
● The research participants, particularly children and young people, may want to be identified and not
anonymised in research outputs.

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5. Professional Standards

There is some standards of ethics that is keeped by professionals in business research. The
corporations, associations, universities have a code of ethics. In the guidelines of of association
they include the ethical standards that has to keep while conducting the business research.

● One comprehensive source contain 51 official codes of ethics issued by 45 association in

business,health and law.
● Each institution have there on set of standards and they will update periodically.

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 5. Professional Standards
IRB (Institutional Review Board) concentrate on two areas (1) Guarantee of obtaining complete,informed
consent from participants. (2)Risk assessment and analysis review.

1. Guarantee of obtaining complete,informed consent from participants.

1) The participant must be competent to give consent.

2) Consent must be voluntary.

3) Participants must be adequately informed to make a decision.

4) Participants should know the possible risks or outcomes associated with the research

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 5. Professional Standards

2. Risk assessment and analysis review.

Risk are considered when they add to the normal risk of daily life. Significantly, the only benefit considered is the
immediate importance of the knowledge to be gained.
However, without enforcement, standards are ineffectual. Effective codes (1) are regulative, (2) protect the public
interest and the interests of the profession served by the code, (3) are behavior-specific, and (4) are enforceable.

Federal, state, and local governments also have laws, policies, and procedures in place to regulate research on
human beings. These codes and rules will help the research to meet the required standards.

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 5. Professional Standards
Although codes, policies, and principals are very important and useful, like any set of rules, they do
not cover every situation, they often conflict, and they require considerable interpretation. It is
therefore important for researchers to learn how to interpret, assess, and apply various research
rules and how to make decisions and to act ethically in various situations. The vast majority of
decisions involve the straightforward application of ethical rules.

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 6. Resources for Ethical Awareness
Journals and Magazines

Alert!; http://alert.marketingresearch.org/

Business Ethics; www.business-ethics.com/.

Business Ethics Quarterly; https://secure.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/journal?openform&journal=pdc_beq.

Business and Professional Ethics Journal, DePaul University; http://commerce.depaul.edu/ethics/research-

teaching/publications/
business-professional-ethics-j.asp.

Business and Society; (IASB Journal); http://bas.sagepub.com/.

Business and Society Review; http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0045-3609.

Business and Society Review, Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College; http://www.bentley.edu/cbe/.
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 6. Resources for Ethical Awareness
Journals and Magazines(continued)

Electronic Journal of Business Ethics and Organizational Studies (EJBO); http://ejbo.jyu.fi /.

Ethics Newsline; www.globalethics.org/newsline/.

Ethikos; www.ethikos.com/.

Journal of Business Ethics; www.springerlink.com/content/100281/.

Journal of Business Ethics; http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/busi.

Marketing Research; http://www.marketingpower.com/AboutAMA/Pages/AMA Publications/AMA Magazines/Marketing

Research/MarketingResearch.aspx.

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 6. Resources for Ethical Awareness
Research, Training, and Conferences

Advanced Research Techniques Forum, American Marketing Association Chicago, IL (800 AMA-1150;
www.marketingpower.com).

Applied Research Ethics National Association (ARENA) Boston, MA (617-423-4412; www.primr.org/).

Business ethics conferences, The Conference Board, New York, NY (212-759-0900; www.conference-board.org).

Center for Business Ethics, Bentley College, Waltham, MA (781-891-2981; www.bentley.edu/cbe/).

Center for Ethical Business Culture, University of St. Thomas, Minneapolis, MN (800-328 6819 Ext. 2-4120;
www.cebcglobal.org/).

Center for Ethics and Business, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA (310-338-2700;
www.ethicsandbusiness.org).

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 6. Resources for Ethical Awareness
Research, Training, and Conferences (continued)

Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC (704-687-2850; 3542
http://ethics.uncc.edu/).

Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL (312-567-3017;
www.iit.edu/).

Council of American Survey Research Organization (CASRO), Port Jefferson, NY (631-928-6954; www.casro.org).

Dartmouth College Ethics Institute, Hanover, NH (603-646-1263; www.dartmouth.edu/~ethics/).

Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (617-495-1336;
www.ethics.harvard.edu/).

Electronic Privacy Information Center, Washington, DC (202-483-1140; www.epic.org).

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 6. Resources for Ethical Awareness
Research, Training, and Conferences (continued)

Ethics Corps Training for Business Leaders, Josephson Institute of Ethics, Marina del Rey, CA (310-306-1868;
www.josephsoninstitute.org).

Ethics Resource Center, Arlington, VA 703-647-2185 www.ethics.org).

European Business Ethics Network Pamplona, Spain (34-948-425-600 ext. 2489; www.eben-net.org).

Graduate Research Ethics Education Workshop, Association of Practical and Professional Ethics, Indiana University,
Bloomington, IN (812-855-6450; http://www.indiana.edu/~appe/).

Institute for Business and Professional Ethics, DePaul University, Chicago, IL (312-362-6624;
http://commerce.depaul.edu/ethics/).

International Association for Business and Society (www.iabs.net/).

Marketing Research Association, Rocky Hill, CT (860-257-4008; www.marketingresearch.org).

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 6. Resources for Ethical Awareness
Research, Training, and Conferences (continued)

Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA (408-554-5319; http://www.scu.edu/ethics/).

The Beard Institute, Palumbo-Donahue School of Business Administration, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh. PA (412-
396-5259;
http://www.duq.edu/business/about/business-and-technology-centers/the-beard-institute.html).

The Carol and Lawrence Ziklin Center for Business Ethics Research, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, A (215-898-1166; www.zicklincenter.org/ ).

The Poynter Center for the study of Ethics and American Institutions Indiana University, Bloomington, IN (812-855-0621;
http://poynter.indiana.edu/).

World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), Lincoln, NE (402-472-7720; http://wapor.unl.edu/ ).

World Association of Research Professionals (ESOMAR), Amsterdam, The Netherlands (31 20 664 2141;
www.esomar.org/).

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