Thank you for reaching out as soon as you realized the existence of an ethical
dilemma in your investigation. As I understand your approach for this research, it
would be submitting 20 false applications making up some data on them and then
collecting the time and identifying who is being called for an interview. Although I
see some concerns of the reliability of this data to determine racist hiring
practices, let me move to the actual ethical dilemma. I am very proud of you
presenting these two principles of Integrity and Justice (APA, 2017) which we
need to observe when conducting any research as yours. I concur with your
balancing act towards justice and the fact that there is a potential benefit to ‘all
persons’ from the contribution of your research. Additionally, your approach is
justified by the three sections on the APA Research 8.07 (2017) of valuable
application, no harm, and appropriate disclosure. As I mentioned before I have
some concerns about the tactical approach and I would like to get more details,
and if you will, I would like to pray with you for some wisdom, direction, and divine
protection, since this topic is really hot nowadays. In general your principles and
standards are in a good place to move forward. This is an interesting problem you
have brought forward regarding your research study on racist hiring practices. I do
believe this is a legitimate issue to address. Due to the legal implications of racist
hiring practices, I do agree that your results would be convoluted if you did not
use deception in your research study. a As you’ve referenced, section 8 of the
Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct covers deception in
research (American Psychological Association, 2022). a It states that researchers
should not use deception unless it is justified that nondeceptive techniques are not
feasible. a I think there’s clear justification here to use this technique because, as
you alluded to, hiring managers would likely not admit if race was a deciding
factor in their hiring decision. a They would also be cognizant to avoid racist
decisions if they knew you were studying them for that purpose. a Nevertheless, we
must make sure that the participants are told about the deception as soon as
possible without compromising the research. a This could be done during the
debriefing process (2022).
a a a a I’m only identifying one solution to the problem here, but I believe it may pose
other concerns for racism or possibly question the difference in people’s
perceptions. a I agree that you have brought forward an alternative that avoids
harm, but we might be studying something other than what we expect to. a Names
do not necessarily correlate to race so we could have some flaws in the results. a I
would propose that we study more than two races as well as to not get pinged for
unfair discrimination per Section 3.01 which covers unfair discrimination. a I think
that if the study was only looking at racism between the Caucasian and African
American population then this would not be relevant. a Otherwise, we might want to
include other races because people from every race have the possibly of being
discriminated against. a I’m not sure the specifics of the study so I apologize if I
have misspoken there. a As a proposed alternative, I think we could send
applicants to pose as possible applicants who have certain levels of qualifications
and different ethnical backgrounds. a We could easily control this and then inform
the hiring managers after of what we have done.
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