Ethical Principles and Practices in Research

When conducting single case research to evaluate the impacts on certain interventions or environmental arrangements on people’s behavior, it is important to attend to ethical issues that could arise, even if you believe that your research is unlikely to cause harm. In this chapter, we will provide a brief history of ethics in applied research with humans (referred to as “human subjects research” in federal regulations); discuss some ethical considerations for researchers, with specific attention to marginalized and vulnerable populations; and describe processes often required to conduct research via the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process. Note that we will sometimes refer to participants as subjects in this chapter, consistent with the terminology associated with ensuring ethical treatment of “human subjects” in the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (also known as the “Common Rule”).