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CASE STUDY 4.5

Ethical dilemmas in research

A financial services company implements a new information technology system that gives email capability to all employees, irrespective of grade. After 12 months, company directors are anxious to know if the investment is providing a financial payback. One indicator is whether the email facility is improving inter-employee communication and general productivity. Hence, they want an analysis of email traffic. An external researcher is commissioned to conduct the study.

She decides to use a blend of quantitative and qualitative methods. On the quantitative side, negotiating access to the information poses no problems, since all she has to do is contact the head of information services. Given that this is a legitimate company project, commissioned by the executive board, he is obliged to give the researcher free access to whatever information she requests.

For the qualitative side of the research she wants to interview a sample of 40 employees. Believing that imposing herself on these people would be unethical, she writes to all of them individually requesting access, and provides details of the purpose of the research, how the information is being collected, and who will read the final report. She had made a request to the executive board that she should be allowed to provide a summary of the final report to all respondents but this was refused. Despite her reassurances, only 12 of the original sample agree to being interviewed, most excusing themselves on the basis that they are too busy. One option would be to obtain an instruction from the managing director, ordering everyone to cooperate. She decides, however, that, not only would this be counter-productive, it would be unethical on a number of grounds not least because the responses would no longer be voluntary. Eventually, she decides that these 12 in-depth interviews will be sufficient to yield high-quality data.

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Having set up the interviews, the researcher first turns to the quantitative analysis of the emails, which she intends to place into a number of categories. However, as the research progresses, she discovers a significant number of personal emails, including jokes, a betting syndicate, plans for illicit liaisons and inflammatory comments about senior managers and the executive board!

The researcher now faces a difficult ethical dilemma. She decides to include general descriptions of the personal emails in her report but not to reveal the names of individuals (although it will not be difficult for the company to trace them given that it now has an email audit trail). She also decides that she will ask some questions about personal emails in her interviews to gain an employee perspective. Before doing this, she takes another look at her letter to the interviewees and the description of her research. She decides that the description, ‘To investigate the purpose of email traffic’ is still valid and an additional letter flagging the new ‘personal email’ probe is not necessary. Participants will still be given the assurance that they can refuse to answer any question and that their responses will be anonymous.