Research is not considered ethical if it

Concept

Research ethics is the set of duties a researcher owes to the people who take part in a study and to the information they provide. Its core obligations are voluntary informed consent, protection from harm, and safeguarding of the participant's identity and personal disclosures through privacy, anonymity and confidentiality. These duties are judged separately from how well a study is designed or executed: a technically rigorous study can still be unethical, and a weak study is not unethical merely for being weak.

Application

The stem asks which failing makes research unethical rather than merely poor. Failing to ensure privacy and anonymity leaves a respondent identifiable and exposes information that was given in confidence, which can bring embarrassment, social harm or loss of livelihood to someone who agreed to help. Because a respondent's identity and disclosures are precisely what the duty of confidentiality exists to protect, such a failure falls inside the ethical obligations set out above rather than inside the study's design.

Contrast

• "does not investigate the data scientifically" points to a defect of method: conclusions reached without systematic, replicable procedure are unreliable, but the fault lies in the reasoning, not in the treatment of the people studied.

• "is not of a very high standard" is a judgement of quality. Ordinary or weak work falls short on merit, and merit is a different yardstick from duty; poor work is not by itself a violation of any obligation owed to participants.

• "tries to prove a particular point" describes a preconceived orientation, which threatens objectivity. It crosses into misconduct only if evidence is then suppressed, distorted or fabricated, and the statement itself does not assert that.

Cross-check

Three of the four statements describe how well the research was carried out: its objectivity, its method and its overall standard. Only one describes what was done to the people who supplied the data, and it is exactly those duties toward participants that the word "ethical" names here.

Result

Research is not considered ethical if it does not ensure privacy and anonymity of the respondent.