Question

Three common areas of ethical dilemmas in qualitative research are:

Conflict of interest.

Research with vulnerable and protected populations.

Self as subject.

Describe each of these common areas of ethical dilemma in detail.

Answer 1

1. A conflict of interest arises in the workplace when an employee has competing interests or loyalties that either are, or potentially can be, at odds with each other.

Example:- A manager who was promoted from a coworker job where he worked with his wife.

2. Vulnerable population- It implies the disadvantaged sub-segment of the community requiring utmost care, specific ancillary considerations and augmented protections in research.

Ethical dilemmas are widely prevalent in research involving these populations with regard to communications, data privacy and therapeutic deliberations.

The vulnerable populations refers to but not limited to children, minors, pregnant women, fetuses, human in vitro fertilization, prisoners, employees, military persons and students in hierarchical organizations, terminally ill, comatose, physically and intellectually challenged individuals, institutionalized, elderly individuals, visual or hearing impaired, ethnic minorities, refugees, international research, economically and educationally disabled and healthy volunteers.

The cornerstones of vulnerable participant safeguard ubiquitously comprises of comprehensive IC process, authorized substitute decision makers, addressing privacy and confidentiality concerns, justified benefit versus risk assessments, equitable justice and methods of subject selection.

3.  Self-experimentation studies can raise questions about whether analyses of just a few individuals are scientifically valid. Self-monitoring experiments are not randomized or blinded like traditional human studies, and the experimenter’s personal involvement and motivations could make the research seem less objective.

Self-experimentation, therefore, can offer a way to calibrate tools and technologies that are otherwise hampered by relying on an individual’s subjective experience.

Example-What exactly do we mean by our “own life” and our “experiences in the world”? How much of this can we detect in advance? How much appears in process? How much is invisible to our own eyes?