Research Ethics

Abstract

Ethics — or what is deemed to be good or bad in human conduct — has become a key issue in market research, just as it has in many other areas of business practice. Research is particularly prone to ethical assessment partly because there are many who regard it as an invasion of privacy, and therefore inherently unethical, and partly because research has been abused. Typical abuses include misrepresentation of research results to ‘prove’ a point and use of a market survey as a cover for some other information gathering or selling activity. Business and competitive intelligence are even more prone to censure on the grounds that they are unethical because the information they seek may be regarded as confidential.