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Ethics in social research

A voice from the field

Day-to-day field research inevitably raises any number of situational ethical dilemmas. How should we respond, and how do we distinguish between knowledge and politics in research?

■ Methods

The history of the twentieth century is littered with stories of human misery caused in the name of research. Joseph Mengele and other Nazi medical doctors deliberately infected Jews in the concentration camps and then murdered them to conduct post-mortems in the name of advancing medical science. Between 1932 and 1972, the doctors of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama were funded by the United States Public Health Service to lie to 600 African American men about their health and withhold treatment. They did this to chart the natural progression of syphilis — a highly contagious and life-crippling disease.

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Previous

How to answer an AQA-style theory 20-mark question

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Race and ethnography: hanging out in a boxing gym

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