I attended a course on ethics in field research once. It really was about how to get cover for using people as playthings in research.
At no time do they mention that people were gracious enough to give up their time to participate in your research and you should respect that. It was simply taken for granted that the subjects of the research were something that was to be used by the researcher.
The best example of this is the new fashion in economics and elsewhere of correspondence studies or audit studies.
Correspondence studies or audit studies are where you send thousands of dummy job applications out to job vacancies to see what happens in terms of how varying the race, the sex or other characteristics of otherwise identical dummy applicant influences the call-back rate to applicants.
If the dummy application gets a call back, the researcher just says that the application has been withdrawn. The researcher never tells the employer who phoned that the application was a dummy and part of field research approved by an ethics board and that they were wasting that employer’s time when they made the dummy application.
At no time, does the researcher express any regret that perhaps the employer might have called the dummy applicant in preference to a genuine applicant who was since moved on because they were not contacted in time. Time is money in the private sector and many small businesses operate on thin margins.
These researchers were wasting peoples’ time.The rudeness of that was never discussed.
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