Ethical Education and Research

Abstract

Many books have been written about ethics and educational research and these tend to focus on the actual implementation of just the methodology with a discussion of codes of practice and ethical dilemmas. Those that focus on the whole research process are not in the majority. In this book so far, ethics has been implicit in the discussion and embraced explicitly in the introduction and the discussion of Values. Here I separate ethics from Values and discuss ethical principles as they relate to the research methodology specifically and address the common discourses of research ethics. Normative ethics, which is the area of philosophy that considers right conduct (Driver 2007), describes discourses or theories that concern ‘right action’ in research methodologies and implementation of research and what makes action ‘right.’ Freedom Research has a holistic approach to normative ethics and embraces a range of different ethical approaches as outlined below.