Ethical Issues Involving the Treatment of Respondents

The AMA code addresses two areas involving participants:

• The activity must be research and not have as its real purpose the sale of merchandise to the respondent.
• If it has been agreed to or promised, the participants’ anonymity must be protected.

Also if revealing their survey responses would injure the participants any way, adherence to this norm becomes even more important. A respondent may be considered anonymous when the researcher cannot identify a given response with a given respondent. However these two issues just scratch the surface of ethical issues pertaining to participants.

In a recent article, Tybout and Zaltman argued that participants in marketing research studies have not been subject to high enough ethical standards by researchers. Using codes of ethics from the sociological and psychological professional associations They have suggested that participants should have the following rights:

Right to Choose: Respondents should have the freedom to choose whether or not to participate in a study. The researchers should make the subject aware of this right. In the same vein, the subject should be given enough information so that he or she can make the proper choice.

Right to Safety: Respondent’s anonymity must be maintained. He or she should also be protected from psychological and physical harm. Though marketing research activities causing physical harm are rare, they may induce psychological stress and anxiety. The researchers should protect subjects from psychological stress by pretesting the level of stress encountered. Researchers can also relieve the stress that does occur by conducting debriefing sessions to reassure the respondents and allay their fears.

Right To Be Informed The respondents must be informed of all aspects of the research. However, there are instances where complete knowledge is likely to bias data. Therefore, information may be withheld until the data are collected. After that a debriefing should follow to provide subjects with information about the study.

Right of Privacy: Of all the ethical issues related to marketing research activities, the right to privacy seems to be one of the most critical. Basically, we are talking about intrusion on an individual’s solitude, or his seclusion. Marketing research often represents an intrusion into the lives of people. Participation in marketing research process requires a significant amount of respondent’s time and effort. Moreover, Marketing Research often requires that an individual decide for himself whether he wants to share his feelings, opinions and facts about himself.

A realistic position that researchers can take, considering the public’s increasing concern for its privacy, is to convince consumers that the research activities will ultimately benefit them with products and services more attuned to their needs.

By now you must have realized that just about any research you might conduct runs the risk of injuring other people in some way. Now, it does not imply putting an end to Marketing Research activities, but to make you aware of the various problems and the ways to lessen their impact.

Ethical Issues in the Treatment of Clients: As per AMA Code of Ethics, Researchers have obligations to their clients in the following three areas:

• The methods used and the results obtained must be accurately represented.
• The identity of the survey sponsor and the ultimate client for whom the survey is being done as well as the information obtained will be held in confidence.
• Research should not be undertaken for competitive clients when such studies would jeopardize the confidential nature of client/researcher relationship.

However, following issues are also required to be taken in consideration:

Confidentiality: Generally researchers have intimate knowledge of client’s concern and the operations; however client has the right to expect from researcher that he or she will keep such confidential information to his knowledge only.

Unqualified Researcher: If a client requests research which is beyond the area of expertise of the researcher, in such case researcher is obliged to reveal his such shortcoming.

Proprietary Information The client has the right to expect that the data collected during the research project and the results derived would be the exclusive property of the client. The researcher can reuse such data only with the permission of the original client and in no case he can charge such data at the original cost.

Unnecessary Research: The research industry does not have any code on this issue. However, researcher is professionally obligated to indicate to the potential client that expenditure for a project may not be warranted.

Presentation of Data: Reports can be presented in such a way as to give an impression of greater accuracy than the data warrant. Such techniques include the use of technical jargons, unnecessary use of complex analytic procedures, failure to round numbers properly and incomplete reporting.