13. Ethics, Power and Research Governance

Introduction and Context

Qualitative research is built on human relationships. Interviews, observations, focus groups, digital traces, organisational documents, and participatory methods all involve people whose experiences, identities, reputations, livelihoods, or communities may be affected by the research process. Ethical research therefore involves more than obtaining a signed consent form. It requires continuing judgement about respect, autonomy, privacy, fairness, risk, reciprocity, and accountability.

In business and management research, ethical questions are intensified by organisational hierarchies. An employee may appear to consent to an interview while believing that refusal could affect promotion. A supplier may participate because a powerful client expects cooperation. A manager may request access to employee data that the researcher is not entitled to disclose. Researchers themselves may face risks when studying corruption, labour exploitation, organisational misconduct, or politically sensitive institutions.

Research governance provides the institutional and legal arrangements through which these issues are anticipated, reviewed, documented, monitored, and addressed. Governance does not replace ethical reasoning. Institutional approval can confirm that a proposal meets procedural requirements, but it cannot guarantee that every field decision will be ethically sound. Doctoral researchers must therefore be able to interpret formal requirements in relation to context, power, uncertainty, and changing circumstances.

This chapter examines informed consent, confidentiality, vulnerability, deception, researcher safety, data ownership, indigenous and cross-cultural ethics, power asymmetries, conflicts of interest, institutional review, data protection, and responsible research. Its central argument is that ethics should be treated as an ongoing practice of reflexive responsibility rather than as an administrative obstacle completed before data collection.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, readers should be able to:

1. Explain the ethical foundations of qualitative research and distinguish procedural compliance from substantive ethical judgement.

2. Design consent, confidentiality, data-management, and safeguarding arrangements appropriate to qualitative inquiry.

3. Analyse power asymmetries, vulnerability, deception, conflicts of interest, and researcher safety in field settings.

4. Apply institutional review, data-protection, and responsible-research principles to doctoral projects.

5. Evaluate indigenous, cross-cultural, organisational, and digital research situations with sensitivity to context.

6. Make defensible ethical decisions when research plans change or competing obligations arise.

Ethics as Relational and Situated Practice

Research ethics is commonly associated with principles such as respect for persons, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and respect for communities. Respect for persons requires meaningful autonomy rather than merely a signature. Beneficence and non-maleficence require researchers to maximise plausible benefits and minimise foreseeable harm. Justice concerns fair distribution of research burdens and benefits, including fair selection of participants. Respect for communities recognises that research can affect groups, institutions, cultures, and collective identities beyond individual participants.

These principles can conflict. Confidentiality may protect an employee but prevent disclosure of serious organisational wrongdoing. A highly detailed account may be analytically valuable but make a participant identifiable. A community may request collective review of findings, while individual participants may have different views. Ethical competence involves recognising such tensions and making transparent, proportionate decisions.

A useful distinction is between procedural ethics and ethics in practice. Procedural ethics concerns approval applications, consent forms, risk assessments, data-management plans, and institutional conditions. Ethics in practice concerns the unpredictable situations encountered during fieldwork: a participant discloses abuse, becomes distressed, asks to withdraw after publication, or requests assistance beyond the researcher’s role. High-quality research anticipates such situations while remaining open to revising procedures.

Reflexivity is central. Researchers should examine how their nationality, gender, class, professional status, institutional affiliation, funding, theoretical commitments, and access relationships shape the research. A reflexive account does not eliminate power; it makes power more visible and supports better judgement.

Informed Consent Beyond the Signature

Informed consent is a process through which a person freely agrees to participate after receiving sufficient, comprehensible information about the study. Consent should normally address the purpose of the research, procedures, expected duration, foreseeable risks and benefits, voluntary participation, withdrawal rights, recording, use of quotations, confidentiality, data storage, dissemination, and contact details for the researcher and relevant oversight body.

Consent must be informed, voluntary, and capable. Information should be presented in language appropriate to participants’ literacy, language, culture, and circumstances. Consent is defective when participants misunderstand the study, cannot reasonably refuse, or are not legally or practically able to decide. In hierarchical organisations, researchers should clarify that participation is not a managerial instruction and that supervisors will not know who declined, where feasible.

Consent may be written, verbal, witnessed, digital, or implied through a carefully justified procedure. Written consent is not automatically more ethical: a signature can create fear in undocumented populations or expose participation in politically sensitive research. Conversely, implied consent is inappropriate when participation involves significant risk or sensitive information. The form of consent should reflect the risk, setting, literacy, and expectations of the participants.

Consent is ongoing. Researchers should revisit it when procedures change, new uses of data are proposed, additional people access the data, or the participant’s circumstances change. Participants should understand whether withdrawal means removal of raw data only, removal of identifiable quotations, or withdrawal up to a defined point after analysis. Absolute promises to erase data may be impossible once data have been anonymised, published, or incorporated into a doctoral thesis.

Privacy, Confidentiality and Anonymity

Privacy concerns a person’s control over access to themselves, their spaces, communications, and personal information. Confidentiality concerns the researcher’s obligation to protect information shared in confidence. Anonymity means that identity is not known or cannot reasonably be linked to the data; in most qualitative interviews, the researcher necessarily knows the participant’s identity, so confidentiality rather than complete anonymity is the accurate promise.

Qualitative data are difficult to anonymise. Job titles, unique events, organisational roles, quotations, locations, and combinations of demographic characteristics can enable deductive disclosure. A pseudonym alone may be insufficient. Researchers may need to generalise locations, alter non-essential details, aggregate roles, remove distinctive quotations, or negotiate with participants about the level of attribution. Such alterations should not distort the substantive meaning of the evidence.

Confidentiality also has limits. Researchers should explain circumstances in which disclosure may be required or ethically necessary, such as imminent serious harm, legal obligations, safeguarding concerns, or a participant’s explicit request to disclose. Researchers should not promise secrecy they cannot maintain. In group interviews, the researcher can request confidentiality but cannot guarantee that other participants will respect it; this limitation must be explained before participation.

Secure management includes data minimisation, access controls, encryption, strong authentication, separation of identifiers from research data, careful transcription, secure transfer, retention schedules, and documented destruction. Cloud services and transcription platforms should be assessed for jurisdiction, contractual terms, secondary use, and institutional approval. Data protection law may impose requirements concerning lawful processing, purpose limitation, data minimisation, accuracy, storage limitation, security, and participants’ rights. Applicable law varies by jurisdiction, so researchers must consult institutional policy and competent legal or data-protection offices rather than relying on generic assumptions.

Vulnerability, Safeguarding and Harm

Vulnerability is not a fixed label attached permanently to a category of people. It is relational and situational. Children, people with impaired decision-making capacity, migrants, refugees, people experiencing poverty, patients, prisoners, precarious workers, survivors of violence, and politically marginalised groups may face heightened risks. However, apparently powerful executives may also be vulnerable when disclosure could threaten reputation, employment, legal status, or personal safety.

Ethical review should identify physical, psychological, social, economic, legal, reputational, and relational harms. Questions include: Could participation expose misconduct or immigration status? Could an interview trigger trauma? Could a manager retaliate against an employee? Could publication damage a small community or indigenous group? What support or referral pathways exist if distress occurs?

Safeguarding plans should specify how researchers will respond to disclosures of abuse, self-harm, exploitation, or imminent danger. The researcher is not automatically a therapist, investigator, or social worker. Appropriate responses may involve listening without making promises, explaining confidentiality limits, assessing immediate risk within the approved protocol, and referring participants to qualified services. Researchers should avoid coercive assistance and should not create dependency.

Compensation requires careful design. Reimbursement for time, travel, or inconvenience can be fair; payment so large that it overrides reasonable judgement may be undue influence. The amount and form should be justified in relation to local conditions and institutional rules.

Deception and Covert Research

Deception occurs when researchers deliberately withhold or misrepresent material information about the study. Covert research involves observing or collecting data without participants’ awareness. These approaches may sometimes reveal behaviour that cannot be studied openly, but they undermine autonomy and can create substantial risks.

Deception should be considered only when the research question cannot reasonably be answered non-deceptively, the knowledge is sufficiently important, risks are proportionate, participants are not exposed to unacceptable harm, and independent review approves the design. Where appropriate, participants should receive a prompt and honest debriefing, with an opportunity to withdraw their data. Public settings are not automatically ethically unregulated: people may reasonably expect privacy in a workplace meeting, closed online group, or sensitive community space.

The burden of justification is high, particularly in organisational research where concealed observation may affect employment or trust. Convenience, curiosity, or a desire for more naturalistic data is not sufficient justification.

Power Asymmetries and Research Relationships

Power operates before, during, and after data collection. It influences access, recruitment, the meanings participants attach to the researcher, what they disclose, whose interpretation is treated as authoritative, and who benefits from publication. A doctoral researcher may be subordinate to a sponsor but authoritative in relation to participants. A consultant-researcher may have access because of a client contract, creating uncertainty about whether participants serve research, organisational diagnosis, or managerial control.

Power-sensitive practice includes recruiting through channels that permit refusal, avoiding supervisors’ presence during employee interviews, stating that participation has no employment consequences, offering private interview locations, allowing participants to skip questions, and separating research data from performance-management systems. Researchers should consider whether participants can realistically withdraw and whether findings will be used against them.

Participatory and collaborative methods can redistribute interpretive authority by involving participants in research questions, data interpretation, or dissemination. Yet participation itself can reproduce inequalities if the most articulate or powerful members dominate. Deliberate inclusion, accessible formats, transparent decision rules, and recognition of contributors are necessary.

Reciprocity should not be reduced to promising direct benefits. A study may offer value through respectful listening, useful feedback, capacity building, or community-accessible findings, but researchers must not promise organisational change they cannot control.

Indigenous and Cross-Cultural Ethics

Indigenous research ethics often challenges individualistic models that treat knowledge as an extractable commodity. Responsibilities may extend to ancestors, descendants, land, language, collective identity, and customary authorities. Researchers should investigate community protocols, recognise collective rights, negotiate access with legitimate authorities, and avoid assuming that institutional approval alone authorises research.

Community engagement should occur before data collection and should continue through interpretation and dissemination. Agreements may address data stewardship, intellectual property, benefit sharing, review of culturally sensitive material, researcher obligations, and procedures for resolving disagreement. Community consultation does not remove individual consent; both collective and individual dimensions may matter.

Cross-cultural research requires more than translating a consent form. Researchers should examine differences in concepts of privacy, authority, compensation, illness, time, ownership, and refusal. Local research partners can improve cultural and linguistic validity, but their involvement also raises questions about recognition, payment, confidentiality, and independent criticism. Researchers should avoid treating culture as homogeneous and should remain attentive to internal inequalities involving gender, age, class, ethnicity, and political status.

Ownership, Intellectual Property and Data Stewardship

Ownership of data may be governed by university policy, funder terms, employment contracts, participant agreements, national law, or community protocols. The person who provides information is not necessarily the legal owner of the dataset, and legal ownership does not settle ethical authority. Researchers should clarify who may access, analyse, archive, reuse, publish, or destroy data.

A data-management agreement should address custodianship, access levels, retention, secondary use, authorship, attribution, intellectual property, commercialisation, and dissemination. Participants may have interests in how their stories are represented even when they do not own the dataset. In collaborative research, authorship should reflect substantial intellectual contribution, while acknowledgement should not expose individuals who require confidentiality.

Open-science expectations must be balanced against privacy and collective rights. Full qualitative transcripts should not be deposited openly when re-identification or cultural harm is plausible. Controlled access, metadata-only records, synthetic or redacted excerpts, and time-limited embargoes may provide more responsible alternatives.

Conflicts of Interest and Dual Roles

A conflict of interest exists when personal, financial, professional, institutional, or relational interests could improperly influence research design, conduct, interpretation, or reporting. Conflicts may be actual, potential, or perceived. Examples include researching one’s employer, evaluating a programme one designed, accepting funding from an organisation that may be criticised, supervising a participant, or receiving payment contingent on favourable findings.

Conflicts are not always avoidable, especially in practitioner research, but they must be disclosed and managed. Strategies include independent recruitment, separating research and managerial roles, using an external ethics adviser, protecting raw data from sponsors, preregistering analytical commitments where appropriate, documenting decisions, and reporting limitations. Funding does not automatically invalidate research; undisclosed influence does.

Researcher Safety and Well-Being

A duty of care extends to researchers, assistants, translators, and field partners. Risk assessment should consider travel, lone working, violence, surveillance, infectious disease, digital threats, legal restrictions, emotional burden, and retaliation. Fieldwork plans should include check-in procedures, emergency contacts, safe meeting arrangements, secure devices, incident reporting, and criteria for suspending research.

Emotional safety is often overlooked. Listening to accounts of violence, discrimination, or exploitation can produce distress or vicarious trauma. Supervision, peer debriefing, workload limits, and access to professional support are part of responsible research design. Researchers should not treat endurance as evidence of commitment.

Institutional Review and Research Governance

Institutional review bodies assess whether the proposed research is ethically acceptable, scientifically coherent enough to justify participant burden, and supported by appropriate safeguards. Applications should describe recruitment, consent, risks, confidentiality, data flows, withdrawal, compensation, safeguarding, researcher safety, and dissemination. Approval is normally required before recruitment or data collection, and amendments may be required when procedures change.

Review should be proportionate to risk. Minimal-risk studies still require careful attention to privacy and consent, while sensitive or high-risk research may require specialist review, continuing monitoring, or independent data protection assessment. Approval is not transferable across institutions or countries without checking applicable arrangements.

Responsible research also includes research integrity: accurate representation of evidence, secure records, transparent analysis, appropriate citation, honest reporting of negative findings, avoidance of fabrication and falsification, and fair treatment of collaborators. Researchers should retain an audit trail showing key methodological and ethical decisions. When an unexpected ethical problem occurs, the correct response is to pause where necessary, protect participants, consult supervisors or the review body, document the event, and revise the protocol rather than conceal the deviation.

An Applied Case: Studying Algorithmic Scheduling in a Logistics Firm

Background

The following fictional case illustrates ethical decision-making in organisational qualitative research. A doctoral researcher receives access to a logistics firm implementing algorithmic shift scheduling. The research aims to understand how warehouse workers experience the new system and how managers interpret claims of fairness.

Situation and Problem

The firm’s operations director offers access on the condition that interviews occur during paid work time and that the researcher provide a report identifying “resistant” employees. Supervisors distribute the invitation, and several workers attend interviews together. One worker reports that the system has reduced shifts after she raised safety concerns. She asks the researcher not to tell anyone, but also asks whether the researcher can intervene. The company requests copies of recordings and insists that publication be delayed indefinitely.

Analysis

The arrangement creates several risks. Recruitment through supervisors may be coercive; group interviews undermine confidentiality; the requested identification of resistant workers transforms research into surveillance; and access to recordings would exceed the purpose communicated to participants. The worker’s disclosure raises potential employment and safety risks. The company’s unlimited publication restriction threatens academic independence and may create a conflict of interest.

Approach and Strategy

The researcher pauses recruitment and consults the institutional review body. The protocol is amended so that invitations come from an independent research contact, participation occurs outside supervisors’ presence, and employees can use private locations. Group interviews are discontinued for sensitive topics. The consent process states that the researcher will not identify individual workers to management and explains the limits of confidentiality.

The researcher declines to provide raw recordings and negotiates only a de-identified thematic report. A time-limited sponsor review is accepted solely to identify factual errors or confidential commercial information, not to suppress findings. The worker is offered information about independent support and is asked what, if anything, may be included in the study. The researcher records the disclosure, follows the approved safeguarding procedure, and avoids promising intervention beyond the research role.

Outcome

The revised design produces fewer but more candid interviews. Findings indicate that workers experience the scheduling system not only as a technical tool but as a mechanism affecting voice, safety, and perceived dignity. The final thesis reports the organisational setting at a level that reduces deductive identification. The limitations section explains the negotiated access and the possibility that some workers remained unwilling to participate.

Learning Points

The case demonstrates that access is not permission to compromise autonomy, confidentiality, or independence. Ethical governance is iterative: a serious problem may require pausing an approved study. It also shows that power analysis must include sponsors, supervisors, participants, researchers, and the technology being studied. Ethical quality strengthened rather than weakened the credibility of the findings.

Common Errors, Risks and Limitations

Frequent mistakes include treating a generic consent form as sufficient for every setting; promising anonymity when participants are identifiable; collecting more personal data than the research question requires; storing recordings on personal devices; using quotations without checking disclosure risk; assuming public online content is free for unrestricted research; allowing sponsors to control interpretation; and failing to report protocol deviations.

Another error is ethical formalism: following the wording of an approval document while ignoring what participants actually understand or experience. The opposite error is informal improvisation without documentation. Ethical judgement should be flexible but accountable. Researchers should record why a decision was made, who was consulted, what risks were considered, and how the decision affected participants.

Ethical review also has limitations. Committees may lack local knowledge, review proposals before field conditions are known, or emphasise paperwork over relationships. Researchers may experience institutional pressure to recruit quickly or publish sensitive findings. These limitations make supervision, community engagement, peer discussion, and reflexive documentation essential complements to formal review.

Digital Research, AI and Emerging Issues

Digital platforms create new ethical questions about consent, context, traceability, and scale. A publicly visible post may have been intended for a limited audience. Screenshots can preserve identifiers even after deletion. Automated collection can gather large volumes of irrelevant personal information. Researchers should define a legitimate purpose, minimise collection, respect platform and community norms, and consider whether paraphrasing is safer than quotation.

Generative AI and automated transcription introduce risks involving confidentiality, data transfer, inaccurate transcription, hidden retention, and secondary use. Sensitive material should not be uploaded to an unapproved service. Researchers must verify outputs, preserve the evidential record, disclose material uses of AI where required, and remain responsible for interpretation and authorship. AI cannot provide ethical accountability; it can only assist tasks within an approved governance framework.

Emerging research increasingly requires attention to algorithmic bias, biometric data, workplace surveillance, geolocation, cross-border cloud storage, and data colonialism. The appropriate response is not to reject technology categorically, but to assess necessity, proportionality, reversibility, and who bears the risk.

Best-Practice Framework for Doctoral Researchers

Before fieldwork, formulate a risk-and-power map covering participants, communities, sponsors, researchers, and downstream users. Match consent procedures to context, test information sheets with representatives of the participant group, and create a data-flow diagram showing collection, transfer, storage, access, analysis, retention, and destruction.

During fieldwork, treat consent as ongoing, monitor distress and coercion, maintain secure records, use supervision, and document unexpected events. After fieldwork, recheck identification risk in quotations and case descriptions, distinguish participant accounts from researcher interpretation, honour agreed dissemination conditions, and communicate findings in accessible forms where appropriate.

A defensible ethical decision can usually answer five questions: What is the research purpose? Who could be harmed or disadvantaged? What alternatives reduce the risk? Who has authority to decide? How will the decision be documented and reviewed? These questions connect ethical reasoning with research quality and governance.

Chapter Summary

Ethics in qualitative research is a continuing, relational practice rather than a one-time approval event. Informed consent must be meaningful, voluntary, comprehensible, and revisited as circumstances change. Privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity require realistic promises and careful management of deductive identification. Vulnerability is contextual, and safeguarding must address psychological, social, legal, economic, and physical risks.

Power asymmetries shape access, disclosure, interpretation, and benefit. Researchers must manage organisational hierarchies, dual roles, conflicts of interest, and sponsor influence. Indigenous and cross-cultural research requires respect for collective authority, local protocols, cultural knowledge, and community data governance. Institutional review, data protection, secure stewardship, researcher safety, and research integrity provide essential structures, but responsible judgement remains indispensable. Digital tools and AI increase both capability and risk, making purpose limitation, data minimisation, transparency, and accountability increasingly important.

Key Terms

Informed consent: Voluntary agreement to participate based on adequate understanding of the research.

Ongoing consent: Continued confirmation of participation as procedures, risks, or circumstances change.

Confidentiality: The researcher’s obligation to protect information entrusted by participants.

Anonymity: A condition in which identity cannot reasonably be linked to the data.

Deductive disclosure: Identification of a participant through distinctive contextual details.

Vulnerability: A heightened exposure to harm or constrained capacity to protect one’s interests.

Safeguarding: Procedures for preventing and responding to abuse, distress, exploitation, or serious danger.

Deception: Deliberate withholding or misrepresentation of material research information.

Power asymmetry: Unequal capacity among actors to influence participation, interpretation, or consequences.

Reflexivity: Critical examination of how the researcher shapes the research process and knowledge produced.

Research governance: Institutional, legal, and professional arrangements regulating responsible research.

Institutional review: Formal assessment of a research proposal by an authorised ethics body.

Data minimisation: Collecting only the personal data necessary for the stated purpose.

Data stewardship: Responsible control, protection, access, use, and preservation of research data.

Conflict of interest: An interest that could improperly influence research judgement or be perceived to do so.

Research integrity: Honest, accurate, transparent, and accountable conduct of research.

Reciprocity: Ethical attention to what participants or communities reasonably receive from research relationships.

Collective consent: Recognition that some research requires community or group-level authorisation in addition to individual consent.

Review Questions

Short Answer Questions

1. Why is a signed consent form not sufficient evidence of ethically valid consent?

2. Distinguish confidentiality from anonymity in qualitative research.

3. What is deductive disclosure, and why is it a particular risk in case studies?

4. Identify two ways organisational hierarchies can affect voluntary participation.

5. Why should researchers avoid uploading sensitive data to unapproved AI services?

Long Answer Questions

1. Explain how ethics in practice differs from procedural ethics, using examples of fieldwork uncertainty.

2. Discuss the ethical requirements for researching vulnerable participants, including safeguarding and compensation.

3. Analyse the relationship between indigenous research ethics, collective authority, and data stewardship.

4. Evaluate how conflicts of interest can arise in practitioner or sponsor-funded doctoral research.

5. Explain how institutional review and data-protection governance contribute to, but cannot replace, ethical judgement.

Analytical / Application Questions

1. You are studying employee experiences of a performance-monitoring system, and the employer requests identifiable quotations. Design an ethical response addressing consent, confidentiality, power, and publication.

2. During an interview, a participant discloses serious workplace retaliation and asks you to keep the information completely secret. What factors should guide your response?

3. A community research partner requests control over all findings, while individual participants request unrestricted publication of their own stories. How would you negotiate an ethically defensible arrangement?

22. Multiple Choice Questions with Answers

Question 1

Which statement most accurately describes informed consent in qualitative research?

A. It is completed once a participant signs a form.

B. It is an ongoing process requiring voluntary and sufficiently informed agreement.

C. It is unnecessary when interviews concern workplace issues.

D. It requires researchers to guarantee direct benefits to participants.

Correct Answer: B. It is an ongoing process requiring voluntary and sufficiently informed agreement.

Question 2

Why is anonymity often difficult to guarantee in qualitative case studies?

A. Researchers are prohibited from using pseudonyms.

B. Participants always know one another’s identities.

C. Distinctive contextual details may permit deductive disclosure.

D. Qualitative data cannot be stored securely.

Correct Answer: C. Distinctive contextual details may permit deductive disclosure.

Question 3

Which recruitment practice best reduces coercion in an employee study?

A. Having supervisors select the employees to be interviewed.

B. Conducting interviews in front of the employee’s manager.

C. Allowing an independent contact to distribute invitations and explain voluntary participation.

D. Requiring all employees to participate during work hours.

Correct Answer: C. Allowing an independent contact to distribute invitations and explain voluntary participation.

Question 4

What is the most appropriate reason to consider deception in research?

A. It makes recruitment faster.

B. It is convenient for the researcher.

C. The research is important and cannot reasonably be conducted non-deceptively, with proportionate safeguards.

D. Participants are unlikely to discover it.

Correct Answer: C. The research is important and cannot reasonably be conducted non-deceptively, with proportionate safeguards.

Question 5

Which situation is an example of a conflict of interest?

A. A researcher securely stores interview recordings.

B. A researcher evaluates a programme that they designed while controlling the interpretation of its success.

C. A participant requests a plain-language summary.

D. A researcher uses a pseudonym in a publication.

Correct Answer: B. A researcher evaluates a programme that they designed while controlling the interpretation of its success.

Question 6

What does data minimisation require?

A. Collecting all data that may become useful later.

B. Collecting only data necessary for the stated research purpose.

C. Deleting data immediately after every interview.

D. Making all collected data publicly available.

Correct Answer: B. Collecting only data necessary for the stated research purpose.

Question 7

In indigenous research, why may community-level engagement be necessary in addition to individual consent?

A. Individuals cannot provide consent under any circumstances.

B. Knowledge and research impacts may have collective cultural significance and governance requirements.

C. Institutional review is not required for indigenous research.

D. Community leaders automatically own every individual’s story.

Correct Answer: B. Knowledge and research impacts may have collective cultural significance and governance requirements.

Question 8

A sponsor asks for raw recordings so it can identify critical employees. What is the strongest ethical response?

A. Provide the recordings because the sponsor enabled access.

B. Provide them if the sponsor promises not to publish them.

C. Refuse or renegotiate access because it creates surveillance and confidentiality risks inconsistent with the research purpose.

D. Delete the recordings before analysis.

Correct Answer: C. Refuse or renegotiate access because it creates surveillance and confidentiality risks inconsistent with the research purpose.

Question 9

Which action best reflects responsible researcher-safety practice?

A. Continuing fieldwork despite credible threats to demonstrate commitment.

B. Using check-in procedures, secure communication, emergency contacts, and criteria for suspending fieldwork.

C. Allowing participants to supervise the researcher’s movements.

D. Avoiding documentation of safety incidents.

Correct Answer: B. Using check-in procedures, secure communication, emergency contacts, and criteria for suspending fieldwork.

Question 10

What should a researcher generally do when an unexpected serious ethical problem arises during an approved study?

A. Continue unchanged to avoid delaying the project.

B. Conceal the problem if no participant complains.

C. Pause or modify activities as needed, protect participants, consult the relevant oversight structure, and document the decision.

D. Transfer responsibility entirely to the participant.

Correct Answer: C. Pause or modify activities as needed, protect participants, consult the relevant oversight structure, and document the decision.