Research Ethics

All professions are guided by a code of ethics that has evolved over the years to acommodate the chaging ethos, value, needs and expectations of those who hold a stake in the professions. Many researchers have evolved a code of ethics separetly for research. Medicine, epidemology, business, law, education, psychology and other social sciences have well – established codes of ethics for research. The most comprehensive code of ethics is that issued the American Psychological Association (1992) , which has become a major standart and model for researchers in the social sciences, another is the British Psychological Societie’s Code of Conduct (1993) .
According to the Collins Dictionary (1979; 502), ethical means ‘in accordance with principles of conduct that are considered correct, especially those of a given profession or group’.
As Soobrayan said ‘there is no single set of rules or practises that govern the ethics, truth and politics of a research project’. There are still debates about the relative merits of different normative approaches to ethical problems. The mechanisms that are used for regulating professional research practice is draw mainly on a mixture of ulitarian and dentological theories of ethics. …