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Themed article
What and why of research ethics?
What is research ethics? Rodrigo Mena is
Chiara Stenico is
Assistant Professor of
Ethics Secretary at ISS
Disaster and Humanitarian Studies at ISS
All images ©Chiara Stenico
Research ethics can generally be understood ‘as the evaluation of attitudes and behaviour based on a combination of ideas of values and reality’ (Lidén, 2020: 61). While this evaluation can be done at the level of the values to guide attitudes and behaviour in research, it can also focus on the reality of the decisions and research practices, for example by assessing their impact. Either way, the ethics of research seeks to ensure that research practices do no harm and do not create conditions for the occurrence of harm (i.e., the risk of harm). However, defining what is harm and what is doing harm is also
context specific. To address this, organizations, groups or other entities reflect on practices that are acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in their particular context and community of practice. In research this has been broadly translated into a process to avoid harming all research-related actors. In more specific terms, this is sometimes translated into guidelines and norms of conduct, such as the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (KNAW et al., 2018). The core tenet ‘do no harm’, captures principles of ‘beneficence’, ‘justice’ and ‘respect for autonomy’ mainly envisioned for research participants. Research ethics complements these with principles assuming the capacity of research to create social value, for example,