reviews of proposals for the use of human subjects for research. According to the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (n.d.), the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and Behavioral Research met in 1979 and prepared the Belmont Report. This report identifies three basic principles that underlie all human subject research:
1 Respect for persons
2 Beneficence
3 Justice
The principle of respect deals with autonomy and self-determination. People should be allowed to choose for themselves the risk they wish to undertake. Study subjects have full autonomy when they can understand the risks involved and have the freedom to volunteer without coercion.
The principle of beneficence requires that we minimize harm and maximize benefits. Risk assessment is a key theme. The principle of justice requires us to design research that does not unduly target its risks to certain groups of people and fails to treat different types of people equably or fairly. If you plan to collect data from people in prisons, you can expect the IRB to give your proposal a full review because of the vulnerable nature of the prison experience. If your study is about prison life, you will probably be okay with that because the class of people who are the participants is the same as the class of people who will benefit from the results.
Informed Consent and Privacy
For most research studies, informed consent is required. This means that the study subjects have given their consent, and they were clearly informed about the risks and were truly given the opportunity to refrain from participation without coercion. In this process, information about risk should be complete. There are a few exceptions where consent is not required, but these situations rarely refer to human service evaluation studies, so they will not be discussed here.
A key issue is the subject’s ability to give informed consent. Research using children as research subjects often requires full review because children are not in a position to give fully informed consent. Research involving persons of limited literacy or intellectual ability requires more care in the assurance of this consent.
Not only must subjects give their consent, but they must also be given the opportunity to withdraw from participation at any time they desire. In this regard, the subject must be notified that there will be no penalty for withdrawal, such as losing service benefits.
Privacy refers to our ability to control access to information about ourselves. Confidentiality (for research subjects) refers to implied or explicit contracts among individuals about the sharing of information one person may have about another. To the extent feasible, privacy should be protected by the researchers.
There is a distinction between private behavior and public behavior. Public behavior can be observed for research purposes without the need for formal review of research proposals, whereas private behavior cannot. Private behavior is that behavior that one would normally expect to be private. This would include a conversation between two people alone on a park bench where there clearly is no one within hearing distance. The use of an electronic device for hearing conversations from someone 30 yards away could be interpreted as a violation of privacy because it would be reasonable for these individuals to believe that their conversation was private. However, the behavior of a group of people playing football in a park would be considered public behavior.
Risks and Benefits
A risk is a disadvantage to the study subject, while a benefit is an advantage to either the study subject or society in general. Risk normally refers to privacy or harm to participants. Examples of the latter are procedures that place study subjects under stress or risky procedures like administration of drugs. Asking a client to complete a scale designed to measure target behavior normally holds no risk of harm from the procedures, so the issue of invasion of privacy is usually the only theme to be addressed in a typical study of human services.
When there are risks, you must review the balance of risks with benefits. Sometimes the risk is only held by the study subject, and the benefit is to society in general. In this case, you will determine if the benefit warrants the risk. This is not an easy question to answer.
An issue you should consider when facing risks is whether you have available procedures that are less risky. Even if you could cogently argue that the benefits of this study will outweigh the risks, you will be expected to employ a less risky procedure that will achieve equal benefits. Whatever the risks, they should always be minimized to the extent feasible.
Justice
Justice refers to whether certain vulnerable populations are being singled out for unusual burden from the study procedures being undertaken. This is not likely to be an issue for human service research for the day-to-day practitioner because you are dealing with clients who have asked for service. If you were conducting a different kind of study with a national sample of persons from low-income communities, the question would be raised as to whether your study purpose necessitates that data be drawn only from this type of population. It might seem unfair to target governmental housing projects simply because it is well known that persons in these homes feel that they must answer anyone’s questions because their housing is being subsidized. If your study is about people in subsidized housing, this would be okay. But if it is about a general topic that has nothing specific to do with subsidized housing or poverty, your IRB might raise a question about using only such communities for your study subjects.
Challenges for the Social Work Researcher
There are a number of challenges facing you as a social work researcher in the implementation of the ethical principles for the use of human subjects in research. This includes adhering to all the principles discussed above. There are several questions you will confront, some of which are discussed in this section of the chapter.
Obtaining Informed Consent
Informed consent refers to the consent of the study subject to participate in your study. It is your duty to provide the necessary information to assure that the consent to participate is informed. You can obtain guidance on this theme from the IRB of your institution. The essential elements of informed consent are displayed in Exhibit 3.2, along with an explanation and an example for each element. These elements were taken from a document from the University of Michigan (Research Ethics and Compliance, 2018).
The social work researcher has a special challenge in obtaining consent for children or those who are mentally limited. Children are often considered not to have this competence to give informed consent, so a parent or guardian often has to sign for the consent. But what about adults who are impaired in some way. There is no clear rule for how to do this, but it is a major challenge in some situations.
Protecting Privacy
Protecting privacy means the study subject remains anonymous regarding the data you employ. You do not report, for example, the depression score of Jane Dougherty or the age of Paul Samuels. No one really does this in social work research, partly because it has no benefits to research and also because of the obvious fact that it provides an ethical problem.
An aid in the protection of the privacy of the study subject is to obtain your information from the subject anonymously. In this way, you do not know the identity of the subject, so you have no opportunity to violate his or her privacy. The other avenue is to assure confidentiality. This means that you
