The reform approach to ethical control of sociological researches

The researchers UK universitiesworking in the field of sociology, to develop a common list of ethical principles. This document will allow to refuse from excessive ethics oversight of sociological studies, which significantly complicates their implementation.

In the last decade in the UK, the state and international funds required to conduct all research related to human involvement, through a special ethics committees. This reform introduces a national list of rules, ethical norms, allowing to increase the freedom of researchers and to reduce the bureaucratic burden.

Professor Dingwall (Dingwall), Professor of sociology at the University of Nottingham and member of the Academy of social Sciences, is one of the developers of this document. He said Committee members often are not able to evaluate the ethical component of their research, and mainly focused on that, not to spoil the public reputation of the University. As a result, sometimes even a potentially very important projects were not submitted to the ethics committees because of the fear of rejection.

In the working group of the Academy of social Sciences hosted the first of the planned conferences with scientific societies to develop common ethical principles for researchers working in all areas of social Sciences. It is hoped that the result will produce a set of rules that inform researchers about what ethical standards they must follow in their work. The end of the development of this document is scheduled to be completed in October 2013.

The new instrument would free the researchers from stringent care and give more freedom to their sociological studies. I hope that this will lead to new breakthroughs in science and deeper understanding of society.

Source: Paul Jump, Times Higher Educational

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