Do Ethics Matter? Documenting Discussions of Ethics in Published Research

• In Event: Conflict Processes 1 Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

Researchers in comparative politics and international relations frequently employ data collection methods that involve interaction with human subjects, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and field experiments, inter alia. Because of the very real potential for physical, social, and/or psychological harm to participants, collaborators, and others, such research raises ethical issues relating to the treatment human subjects. While present in all research involving human participants, these issues are particularly salient in conflict settings due to the vulnerability of subjects and weak regulatory structures. Following this observation, recent work has called on scholars to foreground ethical issues at all stages of the research process, from design to post-publication (Campbell 2018, Fujii 2012, Cronin-Furman and Lake 2018, Wood 2006).

Researchers may broadly agree that ethics should matter, particularly in research on conflict. However, whether researchers, editors, and reviewers treat ethics as if they matter is a separate, empirical question. This paper addresses this question through an analysis of articles involving human subjects research, including on conflict processes, published in five prominent comparative politics and international relations journals (five-year Impact Factor > 3.0) from 2010-2019. Preliminary analysis of a sub-sample of 276 articles from 2015-2019 indicates that discussions of research ethics are infrequent, with approximately 5.1 percent referencing ethics. Moreover, we note that many references to ethics in this sub-sample are cursory, focusing on “procedural” considerations relating to Institutional Review Board approval, rather than substantive ethical issues concerning the treatment of human subjects or other matters.

Based on our data collection and analysis, we develop a typology that identifies categories of variation in the frequency and depth of discussions of ethics in published comparative politics and international research; these categories range from no discussion of research ethics to “negative” references where researchers note that a desired method is infeasible because of ethical constraints, limited references to procedural ethics, and discussions of substantive ethical issues in varying degrees of depth, inter alia. We propose to use this typology to categorize the articles in our larger sample and to test various explanations for variation in attention to ethics, including sub-field, methodology, research setting, and various researcher characteristics such as gender, career status, and graduate training background.

Authors

• Stephanie Schwartz, University of Southern California

• JOHANNA RODEHAU-NOACK, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

• Sarah Ashley Cueva, Columbia University

• M.P. Broache, University of North Carolina at Greensboro