Background
Researchers have to understand that most studies that use human beings as samples are directed towards striving to attain human welfare, understanding, and knowledge, and towards the investigation of the cultural or social dynamics. It is critical for researchers to consider such elements because of many reasons. For instance, the measures are taken to ensure an alleviation of human suffering, the validation of scientific or social theories, the dispelling of ignorance, evaluation of policy, and for the comprehension of human behavior as well as the evolving conditions of humans. The desire for new knowledge understanding always motivates research done using human samples. However, it is critical that researchers seek to stick to the ethical considerations related to the nature of such studies.
This paper appraises three studies for ethical issues. The author examines the ethical implications presented in the adopted designs, the recruitment of samples, consent, data collection methods, the retention of such data and the distribution of the findings. The analysis finds similarities in the ethical considerations for studies adopting the same research methodology and using primary information collected on human sample populations. However, the author of this report discovers that the study using a quantitative methodology using secondary data has a narrow focus on the issues of ethics since they do not collect information on human samples but do not use respondents directly.
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Review of the Studies for Ethical Issues
Arnetz et al. (2015). Understanding patient‐to‐worker violence in hospitals: a qualitative analysis of documented incident reports. Journal of advanced nursing , 71 (2), 338-348
Ethical Issues in the Study Design
According to Kimmel (2009), it is critical for researchers to consider they reduce the potential harm to the respondents during the development of the research design. It is also notable that when the researchers adopt experimental approaches to study, they should ensure that they extend the beneficial benefits of an intervention to the control groups of respondents at the end of their experimentation and study period. It is notable that the Arnetz et al (2015) study adopts the qualitative approach to studying. In this case, two critical issues related to ethics inherent to this research design should be considered. The first issue concerns the role of the researcher as an instrument of data collection while the other one entails confidentiality. The qualitative approach to data collection always implies that researchers spend much of their time with the respondents, which means that they have to consider two issues while using this approach. First, they should always strive to build a good rapport with the sample of respondents that they would identify. Developing rapport with the respondents is one of the ways through which the researchers would build trust among the respondents and gain information that would otherwise been difficult to obtain. Second, they need to respect the population used in the study.
Since the focus of the ethical framework in the study is to promote the wellbeing of the respondents, it would be useful for the researcher to keep information about the identities of the respondents confidential. The element of confidentiality should always guide researchers who adopt a similar methodology, as do Arnetz and his colleagues since it promotes the willingness of the chosen respondents to share information with them. The fact that the nature of the study means that a power relationship would exist among the respondents and between the population and the investigator means that the researcher has a role of ensuring that the power distance in the identified relationships does not affect the quality of outcome and the nature of such connections. Therefore, they should ensure that they interact with the respondents in ways that communicate their objectives (their role as the researcher) while promoting amicable relationships among the population.
Ethical Issues Related to Recruitment
The study was conducted in a large hospital system that contained up to 15000 employees. The study recruited employees of the hospital system, which means that the researchers were obliged to sticking to the ethical issues concerned with the recruitment of respondents. The first and, perhaps, the most significant element is the respect for autonomy. This ethical principle relates to the realization of the inherent right that people have towards the determination of what they think is right for them. The ethical issue suggests further that the researcher should not play any roles in convincing the respondents to engage into the process if they find it unnecessary to do so. Another issue with the nature of this study is the need for the researcher to stick to the moral principle of confidentiality and privacy. The element of privacy also has legal implications, which suggests further that personal information belonging to one respondent should not be shared with other participants in the research.
The researcher should also consider the element of justice and fairness in recruiting their population. First, the researcher should ensure they employ transparent methods in the selection of respondents to be included in the actual research. For this reason, they needed to use an approach to sampling that provides an equal chance to all the employees of the hospital to be involved in the study population, such as the random sampling technique. Second, the researcher needed to ensure that they distributed the burden of the research evenly among the selected respondents as a means of avoiding to place some respondents in prime positions to deal with issues of data collection at the expense of the others. The researcher would be unfair if they failed to distribute the burden of responsibility among the respondents.
The researcher also needed to ensure a proper balance between the harms and benefits that the population used in data collection would be exposed during the research. It means that they were supposed to stick to the ethical principles of non-malificence and beneficence. The principle of non-malificence directs that the researcher minimize the potential harms to their group of respondents while the other one directs that they increase the benefits associated with an inclusion into the study sample. Since the research was conducted within the workplace setting, it was critical that the researcher avoid instances that might risk the wellbeing of respondents, such as sharing their opinions with other people or requiring collecting information from them at the wrong time.
It is also necessary for researchers to recruit a sample size that is large enough to enable them collect data whose analysis would be sufficient to make generalized conclusions. The nature of the study is to identify evidence that would be compelling enough to suggest a change in workplace policies for hospitals around the US and the rest of the world to transform their regulations on workplace harassment. Therefore, it would be ethical that the researcher draws conclusions for generalization when they have collected information from a sizable sample of respondents. However, the study only collected information from 214 respondents from one institution, which means that it would be unethical for the researchers to generalize in their conclusions about the nature of workplace violence related to the nursing profession.
On the Consent
The method used in the collection of data did not require that the researcher obtain consent from the respondents. Specifically, they used computerized systems that were standardized throughout the hospital complex to obtain information about the recruited candidates. Consent was not required since the data sets that were collected were de-identified and that none of the researchers had the ability of linking the reported incidents concerning the data collected to the individual employees. Therefore, it can be deduced that consent was not a necessity in this study since the researchers were assured to the confidentiality and privacy of data and that the adopted methods of data collection did not risk the welfare of the respondents.
Ethical Issues Related to Data Collection
The research design influences the methods of data collection. The choice of the qualitative approach to studying meant that the researcher was supposed to address the issues of privacy and confidentiality of information concerning the respondents. For this reason, it is notable that they did not require their sample population to use information that would identify them to the researchers because it was against the ethical principles they had adopted when they obtained a clearance notification from Human Investigation Committee of Wayne State University. It would have unethical for the researchers to access personal information on the respondents when they considered that consent forms were unnecessary for the nature of their study.
The Ethical Issues Related to the Retention and Analysis of Data
The process of keeping collected data requires that researchers conform to the ethical principles of privacy and confidentiality. For instance, they are not supposed to share the raw data with outsiders since doing so would compromise the wellbeing of the respondents. The fact that the study contained workplace-related data suggests that its accessibility by unauthorized persons would result in negative implications on the part of the sample population because of the sensitivity it may be carrying. For this reason, the researchers required an OHS data analyst to eliminate all the personal identifiers before the collected information would be ready for presentation to the research team for analysis. Therefore, to large extend, the study ensured the protection of privacy of the respondents used, which was fundamental for the promotion of their wellbeing through the ethical principles of beneficence and non-malificence.
Ethical Issues in the Dissemination of the Findings and the Use of the Publication
The findings of the study have implications for nursing practice. Specifically, the conclusions from an analysis of collected data, as the researchers suggest, would be useful in informing policy change to ensure that the nurses manage patients in conditions that threaten their safety more effectively. However, much as the information is useful as identified, accessing the information is copyrighted, which means that one has to obtain permission from the journal management if they have to use the suggestions on nursing practice. This dilemma challenges the ethical principle of beneficence, which suggests that ethical decisions should increase the benefits to the largest groups of individuals possible.
Peggy (2013). Stressful incidents of physical violence against emergency nurses. Online journal of issues in nursing , 18 (1), 76.
Ethical Issues in the Research Design
As do Arnetz et al. (2015), Peggy (2013) adopts the qualitative approach to research. Her choice of the research design is such that she prefers the descriptive approach. The choice of this method to researching means that the researcher was bound to collect primary information from respondents, which has number of fundamental ethical implications. Frist, the investigator was supposed to ensure that they stick to the ethical principle of confidentiality. In this case, the study would involve a significant interaction between the researcher and the research sample. In this case, it would be tempting for the researcher to want to share personal information belonging to one respondent with the rest of the groups. Therefore, before conducting the study, it was relevant that the researcher consider the measures they would adopt to minimize instances that would compromise the ethical consideration for confidentiality. The researcher also needed to understand that the choice of their qualitative approach to study would mean that they might collect intimate information about some of the respondents that falls outside the scope of the research. For this reason, it was critical for the researcher to ensure that they stuck to a framework that would avoid collecting irrelevant data from their sample population.
Another ethical issue is a dilemma in which on the one hand, the researcher has to ensure that they forge the most amicable relationships with the respondents and maintain their position as the researcher on the other. Therefore, it would be wise for the researcher to interact only professionally with the team of respondents since any other form of connection would compromise the quality of the association and violate the ethical considerations identified. For instance, the researcher needed to assure the respondents of the fact that they would care for the confidentiality and confidentiality of information as a means of inviting them to provide more data that would be useful in conducting in-depth analyses.
Additionally, the qualitative research design has a number of implications for the wellbeing of the study population. For instance, the researcher needed to be aware of the fact that their approach to studying would risk the social, economic, or political wellbeing of the researchers. Specifically, if they did not handle the collected information appropriately, or if they collected data using a wrong approach, they would compromise the ethical principles of beneficence and non-maleficence. Since the setting of the data collection was within the hospitals, the researcher was supposed to ensure that their approach to did not risk the social relationships between the respondents and their employers or among the rest of the participants who did not engage in the study.
Ethical Considerations in the Recruitment of the Study Population
The researcher collected information from members of the Emergency Nurses Association, which has critical implications for morality regarding research using human samples. First, the researcher needed to ensure that they stuck to the principle of autonomy. As suggested earlier, the researcher was not supposed to coax any potential respondent into recruiting for the data collection processes. Instead, as the principle directs, they were supposed to let the participants to decide if it were appropriate for them to be involved in the research or if they would have challenges in doing so. The researcher was only supposed to explain the objective of their study to the prospective respondents and leave the decision in their hands. Furthermore, in explaining the goals of the research, it was critical for the investigator to stick to the ethical principle of veracity. This principle requires that the investigators be honest and reveal all the required information in the required formant while avoiding information that would appear deceitful meant to lure the sample population into participating.
Alongside veracity and autonomy, the researcher was to consider the principle of confidentiality and privacy. Even while they do not interact directly with the respondents, they obtain written reports on the information they were seeking from the study population. Two issue underpin the adherence to the principle of confidentiality. First, the researcher should not share private information related to the personal contacts and the names of the population with people outside the research process. If anything, they should not require the respondents to identify themselves since such information would not have any significant contributions to the validity of the findings. Second, they should not share the findings from respective respondents with other people before they analyze and deduce critical patterns that the data suggests.
Still, in relation to the recruitment of the sample population, the researcher was supposed to ensure fairness and inclusivity of the respondents. Fairness meant that they were not to pin down any respondents to give responses to specific questions at the expense of others. Therefore, the questionnaires that they sent to the populations were supposed to have uniformity in the questions they contain and the responses that would be obtained. The researcher ensured this element of the study questionnaire since they standardized them before sending them out to the population that had consented to inclusion into the research process. Concerning the element of inclusivity, it was critical for the researcher to select their sample population using an appropriate sampling technique, which would allow each of them a chance to be recruited. The researcher appeared to be conscious of this element of ethical consideration, which is why they adopted the random sampling technique to recruit only 300 respondents from a potential 3000 from across the nation.
On the Consent
The approach chosen for data collection for this study required the investigator to send consent forms to the potential respondents. The reason for this suggestion is the fact that the research used questionnaires in which the study population was supposed to respond to a series of questions sent to them concerning instances of harassment while in the workplace. Therefore, the nature of the information collected was such that the respondents were bound to include their personal identification information that they hoped the researcher would keep according to the ethical principle of confidentiality and privacy. Therefore, the consent was supposed to inform the respondents of the role of the researcher in handling the collected information, the goals of the study, and the expectations of the population throughout the process. Only those respondents who considered the process worth undertaking would be recruited into the study. The researcher was aware of the ethical implications in the choice of the study sample, which is why they sent out the consent forms to the prospective respondents.
Ethical Issues in the Collection of Data
Since the researcher does not collect information directly from the respondents, the ethical considerations in this process entail privacy and confidentiality. This principle plays a significant role in research using human samples, which is why it keeps appearing in most of the analysis subsections of this report. In this case, the researcher collected information from 300 respondents from across the nation. They do not mention the manner in which they ensured that their questionnaires and other tools of data collection did not capture personal information from the population. Therefore, it was quite critical for the investigator to stick to the highest standards of privacy and confidentiality of the collected information since it would have implications on the wellbeing of their respondents. For instance, they were supposed to ensure that they do not reveal the raw information from the received questionnaires to any unauthorized parties. It would only been appropriate for the researcher to reveal the findings of the analyzed data that does not contain personal information concerning the study population.
Ethical Considerations in Data Retention and Analysis
The same principle of confidentiality applies to the instances of data retention by the researcher. In this case, it was necessary for the researcher to keep information collected from the study population away from the reach of unauthorized parties, which would ensure that they avoid the adverse implications that would be associated with disclosure. A fresh consideration in the analysis of the data collected was the need for the researcher to ensure the validity of the information. Validity has a connection with the implications of research findings. It is ethical that researchers recommend policy change or inform the public using valid information from their study as opposed to generalizing trends without proper analysis. The study adopted the Lincoln and Guba (1985) criteria used in the determination of confirmability, dependability, and transferability. Therefore, the study’s findings would be considered valid because of the criteria used to test such a parameter.
Ethical Considerations in the Dissemination of the Findings of the Research and the Journal Publication
The results of the data collection and analysis have implications for nursing best practices. For this reason, it would be ethical for the researcher to contribute to the existing body of knowledge on harassment and working conditions of nurses in the country. However, the information is copyrighted by the journal in which the findings are published, which would result in the violation of the principle of beneficence. The only advantage that people wishing to draw from the findings of the study have is that they may follow the correct procedures in obtaining the article since it is available to anyone who does so through the electronic databases.
Spector, Zhou, & Che. (2014). Nurse exposure to physical and nonphysical violence, bullying, and sexual harassment: a quantitative review. International Journal of Nursing Studies , 51 (1), 72-84.
Ethical Issues Inherent in the Design of the Study
This study is quite different from the first two, which have been analyzed for ethical considerations both in methodology and in design. While the first two were qualitative researches, Spector, Zhou, and Che conduct a quantitative research. They further use a systematic review in the collection of data. From this perspective, the ethical issues reviewed according to the first two studies may not apply to the current one. For instance, the researchers do not have to worry about the quality of their relationships with the respondents since they will not be interacting with them physically. It is also notable that they may not have to stick to the ethical principles of privacy and confidentiality, as did the authors of the other studies since the nature of their research design does not require them to collect primary data on the respondents. Therefore, the researchers did not have to worry about the manner in which they related with the respondents since they were involved in the extraction of secondary information. The meta-analysis structure of their study did not require any significant guarding against the possibilities of harming the respondents.
Ethical Issues in Recruiting
The study does not use primary data, which is why the researcher did not have to worry the ethical issues related to the obtainment of samples for primary data collection. For example, they did not have to worry about justice and inclusiveness of respondents. As much as they conduct a random sampling technique in the finding the relevant studies, this procedure does not affect the respondents since they virtual. By virtual, it means that instead of the researcher having to deal with the sample population directly, they do so from the included studies. Each of the studies that the researchers incorporated into their meta-analysis had a specific group of respondents, which the authors did not have any levels of control in their selection. Therefore, the burden of research and the issues of inclusivity fall outside the scope of the researcher.
On the Consent
The study did not require obtaining a consent from the study sample since the researchers do not use human or animals in their data collection. Therefore, the need of having to exercise the ethical principle of autonomy does not affect a study of this nature since there are no physical respondents to whom the consent forms would be sent. In addition, the objective of the consent is always to inform the prospective respondents of the objectives of the study and to assure them of their privacy and confidentiality during the actual research. However, the current research does not need to have such a framework since the data collection process deals with archive information that is not subject to the ethical principle of autonomy.
Ethical Issues on the Collection of Data
The ethical issues reviewed in the preceding sections concerning the collection of data do not apply to the nature of this study. For instance, the most significant issues of ethics, the need to maintain privacy and confidentiality for the promotion of the welfare of the respondents did not have any significance in the context of the researchers since they drew their sources from online databases. They stuck to the rules of searching for studies from electronic databases mainly Medline, CINAHL, and PsycInfo, which did not expose them to the same challenges of ethics, as did the rest of the authors whose work is included in this analysis. The data collection methodology, however, exposed them to a newer challenge, which was to ensure responsible use of information published by other researchers. The fact that the researchers used information published in different journals suggests that they were likely to have been protected by copyrights, which means that users should be responsible while using such information. Therefore, it was ethical for the researchers to conduct the publishers or the original researchers of the included studies for permission before using such intellectual works in the completion of their research.
Ethical Issues Related to Data Retention and Analysis
The researchers did not have any ethical obligations to protect private information collected since it did not concern any persons. The secondary data extracted from electronic databases was devoid of any personal identifiers, which suggests that their users would not need to promote the safety and wellbeing of individuals whom such data concerned. In the data analysis, the researchers were supposed to ensure they eliminated all cases that would appear to identify individuals by name or using any other forms of personal identification information.
Ethical Considerations in the Dissemination of the Research Findings and the Use of the Journal
The research findings concern an issue of policy that would improve the wellbeing of nurses practicing in unconducive environments. For this reason, it would be ethical for the researchers to share their findings with the rest of the world, especially with the policymakers in the appropriate field for improving human welfare. However, the authors published their findings in a journal, which keeps such information out of the reach of many people, especially because of the need to respect intellectual property rights. Nevertheless, the fact that the publication is accessible online suggests that it would be available to as many people as possible when they followed the correct channel, which involves seeking permission from the publishers and the researchers.
Conclusion
An analysis of studies for ethical considerations suggests that researching with primary data collected on human samples has a series of ethical implications. Specifically, the researchers are required to ensure that that they promote the wellbeing of the respondents. The principles of beneficence and non-malificence directs that the researchers should bot expose their research populations to situations that would harm them through destroying relationships with others or exposing them to any other types of physical and psychological torture. It is also clear that the ethical principles of privacy and confidentiality are among the most significant considerations for researchers who collect information from human respondents. For this reason, the researchers are supposed to ensure that they attain the highest levels of privacy and confidentiality through restricting sharing of sensitive information or collecting too much personal information than would be relevant for the nature of their research.
In cases where researchers collect information from respondents directly, consent is a necessary ethical requirement since it serves to inform the population of the objectives of the researcher and the efforts that they would undertake to protect their fundamental rights and promote their wellbeing. Therefore, ethical principle of autonomy is quite significant in researching using human samples. Contrarily, most of the ethical considerations relevant to the collection of primary data do not apply to those dealing with the collection and analysis of secondary information. The analysis also finds that whatever methodology researchers chose for their research, they should always strive to benefit others with their findings through disseminating their information because of the implications for practice and future research that such researches contain.
References
Arnetz, J. E., Hamblin, L., Essenmacher, L., Upfal, M. J., Ager, J., & Luborsky, M. (2015). Understanding patient‐to‐worker violence in hospitals: a qualitative analysis of documented incident reports. Journal of advanced nursing , 71 (2), 338-348.
Kimmel, A. J. (2009). Ethical issues in behavioral research: Basic and applied perspectives . John Wiley & Sons.
Peggy Berry MSN, R. N. (2013). Stressful incidents of physical violence against emergency nurses. Online journal of issues in nursing , 18 (1), 76.
Spector, P. E., Zhou, Z. E., & Che, X. X. (2014). Nurse exposure to physical and nonphysical violence, bullying, and sexual harassment: a quantitative review. International Journal of Nursing Studies , 51 (1), 72-84.
