Ethics of Educational Research: An agenda for discussion

[From Introduction] ‘Ethics embody individual and communal codes of conduct based upon adherence to a set of principles which may be explicit and codified or implicit, and which may be abstract and impersonal or concrete and personal’. Zimbardo (1984, cited in Cohen et al, 2000:58) Pring (2000) takes a slightly different view, drawing a distinction between ethics and morals, however the latter emerge in different situations. ‘Ethics [are] the philosophical enquiry into the basis of morals or moral judgements’ (p.141) whereas ‘morals [are] concerned with what is the right or wrong thing to do’ (idem). By focusing on the principles that might underlie the moral dimensions of educational research, rather than trying to exemplify what practical moral decisions researchers might take in particular situations, This paper tries to go beyond the ‘search for rules of conduct’ that Simons (1995: 436) pursued in order to allow researchers to defend their work in various social and political contexts. Such technicist solutions imply an autocratic style of managing research that privileges the views of some people, researchers. This view of managing has ‘at its core a set of values: a disrespectful and distrusting view of people as cogs or components in the machinery of organisations’ (Shipley and Moir, 2001: iv) or other enterprises.