What are the ethical issues in survey research?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Survey research usually poses fewer ethical dilemmas than do experimental or field research designs. Potential respondents to a survey can easily decline to participate, and a cover letter or introductory statement that identifies the sponsors of and motivations for the survey gives them the information required to make this decision. The methods of data collection are quite obvious in a survey, so little is concealed from the respondents. The primary ethical issue in survey research involves protecting respondents.
Protection of Respondents: If the survey could possibly have any harmful effects for the respondents, these should be disclosed fully in the cover letter or introductory statement. The procedures used to reduce such effects should also be delineated, including how the researcher will keep interviews confidential and anonymous. In addition, surveys such as the NISVS and NCVS that attempt to measure sensitive subject matter such as rape and intimate-perpetrated assault should also have other protections in place. When asking about victimizations, particularly those that are perpetrated by known offenders and family members, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been at the forefront of establishing policies to protect respondents. As WHO notes, “The primary ethical concern related to researching violence against women (VAW) is the potential for inflicting harm to respondents through their participation in the study” (Ellsberg & Heise, 2005, p. 38). Because many perpetrators of IPV use control as a form of abuse, a respondent may suffer physical harm if an abuser finds out that he or she disclosed information about their relationship to an interviewer. Guidelines to prevent this from happening include interviewing only one person in the household (Ellsberg & Heise, 2005). In addition, a graduated informed consent process is also recommended. For example, when first contacting a potential respondent, the initial person who answered the telephone should be provided only general information about the survey topic (e.g., on health-related issues). Only after a respondent is selected from a household should they be told about the specific topics that would be covered (e.g., violent victimizations). Interviewers should also remind respondents that they can stop the interview at any time, and safety plans should be established between the interviewer and the respondents.
Minimizing respondents’ distress by reliving victimization events and providing them with information on services and resources that can help their situation are also necessary. For example, the NISVS provided telephone numbers for the National Domestic Violence Hotline and the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network at the end of interviews. The College Risk Behavior Survey discussed earlier in this chapter also gave respondents information about a number of avenues for help seeking, including the phone numbers to the University of Delaware Center for Counseling and Student Development, the Delaware Council on Gambling Problems, and the Delaware 24-Hour Rape Crisis Hotline. As you can see in Exhibit 7.9, the last screen of the survey provided this information to respondents.
Respondent protection is even more complicated when asking about victimizations against minor children, as the NCVS does (e.g., it interviews individuals aged 12 or older). Currently, researchers do not fall under the purview of mandatory reporters, according to most state statutes, and the WHO claims there is no consensus internationally about how to handle cases of child abuse (Bachman, 2012). This is true for cases of elder abuse that are reported by respondents as well. Regardless of statutes not explicitly listing researchers as mandatory reporters, however, interviewers should certainly be required to develop protocols to act in the best interests of a child or an elder when cases of these forms of abuse are revealed.
Confidentiality: Do any of the questions have the potential to embarrass respondents or otherwise subject them to adverse consequences such as legal sanctions? If the answer to this question is no—and it often is in surveys about general social issues—other ethical problems are unlikely. But if the questionnaire includes questions about attitudes or behaviors that are socially stigmatized or generally considered to be private or questions about actions that are illegal, the researcher must proceed carefully and ensure that respondents’ rights are protected.
The first step to take with potentially troublesome questions is to consider modifying them or omitting them entirely. If sensitive questions fall into this category, they probably should be omitted. There is no point in asking, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” if the answers are unlikely to be used in the analysis of survey results.
Many surveys—particularly surveys interested in delinquent or criminal offending behavior—do include some essential questions that might prove damaging to the subjects if their answers were disclosed. To prevent any possibility of harm to subjects due to disclosure of such information, it is critical to preserve subject confidentiality. No one other than research personnel should have access to information that could be used to link respondents to their responses, and even that access should be limited to what is necessary for specific research purposes. Only numbers should be used to identify respondents on their questionnaires, and the researcher should keep the names that correspond to these numbers in a separate, safe, and private location, unavailable to others who might otherwise come across them. Follow-up mailings or contact attempts that require linking the ID numbers with names and addresses should be carried out by trustworthy assistants under close supervision.
Only if no identifying information about respondents is obtained can surveys provide true anonymity to respondents. In this way, no identifying information is ever recorded to link respondents with their responses. However, the main problem with anonymous surveys is that they preclude follow-up attempts to encourage participation by initial nonrespondents, and they prevent panel designs, which measure change through repeated surveys of the same individuals. In-person surveys rarely can be anonymous because an interviewer must in almost all cases know the name and address of the interviewee. However, phone surveys that are meant only to sample opinion at one point in time, as in political polls, can safely be completely anonymous. When no follow-up is desired, group-administered surveys also can be anonymous. To provide anonymity in a mail survey, the researcher should omit identifying codes from the questionnaire but could include a self-addressed, stamped postcard so the respondent can notify the researcher that the questionnaire has been returned, without being linked to the questionnaire itself (Mangione, 1995).