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 will not divulge the identity of the study subject with the data associated with his or her answers to the questions. In either case, you will report to the study subject this information when you are working on the informed consent issue.
Exhibit 3.2 Elements of Informed Consent
Source: The “Element” and “Explanation” are taken from Research Ethics and Compliance (2018).
The social work student may need to match the clients’ pretest scores with their posttest scores for the analysis of data. This can be done anonymously by using a set of questions where the study subject answers questions, not known to the researcher, that provides an anonymous identification number. See, for example, the following set of questions:
_____ ←What is the first letter in your father’s middle name? [If unknown, enter X]
_____ ←What is the number of letters in your mother’s maiden name? [If unknown, enter 9]
_____ ←What is the first letter in your mother’s maiden name? [If unknown, enter X]
_____ ←What is the last digit in your social security number? [If unknown, enter 9]
If you ask the participant to answer these questions on your questionnaire and you must administer the same questionnaire two times, you will be able to match this person’s pretest score with his or her posttest score, but you will not know the identity of this person. You can imagine other questions that might be used to achieve the same.
Weighing the Risks and Benefits
It is easy to make the mistake of assuming that you are not permitted, under any circumstances, to create any risk to the human subject of research. Can you, for example, have someone fake a heart attack on a busy city street so that you can observe the behavior of people on the street who observe this behavior? Maybe you want to know how many will help, or how they react emotionally. Can you do this? The answer depends on the level of the risk and the level of the benefits of the study. If the study is viewed by your IRB as having no benefits, the board is likely to deny your proposal. If they view it as having a lot of benefits, they may approve on the basis that the benefits outweigh the risks. How likely are people on the street to have a major problem when they observe such behavior? The question here is not whether it is possible that someone may be damaged by this action but whether it is probable that people will be damaged by it. In the final analysis, it is the judgment of the IRB that will determine the outcome of the request to undertake this study. There is no formula that will guide them, only their judgment.
Risks and benefits must be addressed as an issue when you have the opportunity to deny service to a group of potential clients for a given service in order to use this group as your control group in your research study. Suppose that you have 40 persons who have asked for your special tutoring program for at-risk middle school students, and you are considering the option of randomly selecting 20 of these students to be your experimental group and randomly selecting the other 20 to be your control group. You will give your tutoring program to those in the experimental group but not to those in the control group. You will measure the students in each group to determine if the experimental group had better gains in functioning than the control group.
Is this ethical? The answer lies in the examination of risks and benefits. If you only have the resources to provide your tutoring to 20 students for the current service period, the ethical challenge is reduced. If you can only serve 20, you could select your 20 at random and use the others as the control group. If you have the resources to provide tutoring to the 20 in your control group at a later time period, the burden is further diminished. If you have the capacity, however, to serve all but will only serve 20 for the sake of research, the burden on you to justify this decision on the basis of benefit is great. You will need to make the case that this is a situation where the benefit is so great as to offset the harm to those who have been denied this service for the sake of research. Social workers seldom make such claims because of the duty to serve those in need.
The typical response of the social worker in this situation is to provide the service to all prospective clients and measure their gain during the treatment period as a measure of success. The use of the control group is a superior research design as we will review in future chapters, so you may consider the option of the control group if you have the capacity to serve those in the control group at a later time. You should be cautious, however, of selecting those for the experimental group on the basis of level of need and using the others as our comparison group because you have made the two groups unequal by your selection process. This makes the use of the comparison group questionable from the research standpoint.
Reamer (2010) offers more guidance on the above challenges related to risk, privacy, and informed consent. He admonishes social work researchers to be mindful of risks, sensitive to privacy, and diligent in obtaining informed consent. He offers many suggestions on how to pursue each of these issues.
The Institutional Review Board
The institutional review board (IRB) in major institutions monitors the protection of human subjects in research. The protection of the rights of human subjects in research is the purpose of this review mechanism. This form of monitoring emerged