RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

68 THE ETHICS OF EDUCATIONAL AND SOCIAL RESEARCH
sharing the results after the research
ensuring follow-up psychological or medical
attention after the research.
Even here, however, there are dangers. As
Aronson and Carlsmith (1969) say:
debriefing a subject is not simply a matter of exposing
him to the truth. There is nothing magically curative
about the truth; indeed ... if harshly presented, the
truth can be more harmful than no explanation at all.
There are vast differences in how this is accomplished,
and it is precisely these differences that are of crucial
importance in determining whether or not a subject
is uncomfortable when he leaves the experimental
room.
(Aronson and Carlsmith 1969: 31)
They consider that the one essential aspect of the
debriefing process is that researchers communicate
their own sincerity as scientists seeking the truth
and their own discomfort about the fact that they
found it necessary to resort to deception in order to
uncover the truth. As they say, ‘No amount of postexperimental
gentleness is as effective in relieving
asubject’sdiscomfortasanhonestaccountingof
the experimenter’s own discomfort in the situation’
(Aronson and Carlsmith 1969: 31–2).
The third way of dealing with the problem of
deception is to ensure that new procedures and
novel techniques are developed. It is a question
of tapping one’s own creativity in the quest for
alternative methods. It has been suggested that
role-playing, or ‘as-if’ experiments, could prove a
worthwhile avenue to explore – the ‘role-playing
versus deception’ debate is raised in Chapter 21.
By this method, as we shall see, the subject is
asked to behave as if he or she were a particular
person in a particular situation. Whatever form
they take, however, new approaches will involve
aradicallydifferentsetofassumptionsaboutthe
role of the subject in this type of research. They
require us to use subjects’ motivations rather than
bypassing them. They may even call for increasing
the sophistication of potential subjects, rather
than maintaining their naivety.
Plummer (1983) informs us that even in an
unlikely area like life history, deceptions of a
lesser nature occur. Thus, for example, the general
description given of research may leave out some
key issues; indeed, to tell the subject what it
is you are looking for may bias the outcome
quite substantially. Further, different accounts
of the research may have to be presented to
different groups. He quotes an instance from
his own research, a study of sexual minorities,
which required various levels of release – for the
subjects, for colleagues, for general enquiries, and
for outside friends. None of these accounts actually
lied, they merely emphasized a different aspect of
the research.
In the social sciences, the dilemma of deception
has played an important part in experimental
social psychology where subjects are not told the
true nature of the experiment. Another area where
it is used is that of sociology, where researchers
conceal their identities and ‘con’ their way into
alien groups – the overt/covert debate (Mitchell
1993). Covert, or secret participation, refers to
that kind of research where researchers spend an
extended period of time in particular research
settings, concealing the fact that they are
researchers and pretending to play some other
role.
Bulmer (1982) notes that there are no simple
and universally agreed answers to the ethical issues
that covert research produces. Erikson (1967), for
example, suggests that sociologists have responsibilities
to their subjects and that secret research
can injure other people in ways that cannot be anticipated
or compensated for afterwards, and that
sociologists have responsibilities towards fellow
sociologists. Douglas (1976), by contrast, argues
that covert observation is necessary, useful and
revealing. Bulmer (1982), too, concludes that the
most compelling argument in favour of covert research
is that it has produced good social science
which would not have been possible without the
method. It would be churlish, he adds, not to recognize
that the use of covert methods has advanced
our understanding of society.
Kimmel (1988) claims that few researchers feel
that they can do without deception entirely, since
the adoption of an overtly conservative approach
could render the study of important research hardly