Discuss ethical issues relating to research in the
health and social care sectors
This essay will be discussing the various different ethical issues in relation to research in
health and social care sectors. These ethical issues include academic fraud, involuntary
participation, false incentives, deception and plagiarism. It will explain and describe what the
ethical is, and how they can be prevented.
Academic fraud is the act of cheating at some stage of carrying out or completing research
in health and social care sectors. This could be stealing somebody’s data/findings and
claiming them as your own as well as gathering your own findings and altering the results.
Additionally, academic fraud could be paying somebody else to actually go and collect
findings. It is difficult to actually prevent academic fraud from taking place, as it is sometimes
hard to prove that someone has stolen another person’s findings or have paid somebody
else to carry out research on their behalf. Unless somebody has come forward and claimed
that somebody else has carried out academic fraud whilst carrying out research, then this
can be investigated and dealt with as necessary.
Involuntary participation is another ethical issue that must be considered when researching
in health and social care sectors. Involuntary participation is simply when research
participants are unwillingly taking part, whether they are openly being forced to partake, or
whether they are being forced in a more subtle way. For example, if a teacher asks a group
of students to complete a survey, the students will most likely feel obliged to participate in
the research even if they don’t want to. This is considered an abuse of power as the
teacher’s position is forcing the students to involuntarily participate. In order to prevent
involuntary participation, participants should not be asked to partake in research by
somebody they know, as they will feel that they cannot refuse participation.
Some people use false incentives to encourage people to participate in their research. An
incentive is a reward of some kind to persuade people to do something, this could be money,
voucher or a product. However, a lot of people are offered false incentives, so participants
believe that they are going to gain something from participating in the research but they
never actually receive what they were initially promised. Similar to academic fraud, false
incentives can’t necessarily be prevented, though if a participant of research is a victim of
false incentives this could be reported and dealt with as this is an ethical issue. However,
participants could request that they receive their promised incentive prior to partaking in the
research, to ensure that the incentive is genuine.
Deception is another ethical issue commonly seen in research of health and social care
sectors. Deception – in other words – is lying to those who participate in the research, about
what your research is actually about, or lying about their role in the research. For example,
research around the placebo affect is very controversial due to there being deception to
some extent to the participants. Participants would be aware that they are taking part in
research of a new medicine for example, but would not know that they are actually being
used as a tool to research the placebo effect. This is controversial however, as the research
