The social sciences necessarily involve studies of real people in real situations, and this raises ethical questions regarding the relationship between the researcher and the subject, privacy issues for the subject, questions of the exploitation of subjects, and so on. These issues have become more open in recent years as social scientists have been criticized for certain practices and have had the validity of their research questioned because of a concern for the ethical dimensions of this type of research. An examination of the issues will show the types of questions being raised and some of the suggestions that have been made to avoid ethical problems in the social sciences. Oscar Lewis's ethnographic study of a Mexican family, The Children of Sanchez, will be used as an example. This book has been criticized for perceived ethical lapses, as have other Lewis works, and critics have raised questions about the way the researcher might have used the poverty of one family for his own gain and advancement and about the validity of emphasizing certain aspects of the lives of human beings as if those aspects were definitive.
In recent years there has been increasing concern in the literature regarding the protection of the rights and welfare of human subjects in biomedical, behavioral, and social science research. The initial concern seems to have developed with reference to biomedical research, perhaps because potential damage to the subjects is more clear-cut. The issue was raised after World War II at the Nuremburg trials because of Nazi experimentation on human subjects. The Hippocratic Oath requires first that physicians do no harm, but there is ample evidence that medical doctors have carried out risky and at times fatal research on human subjects without their consent or even their awareness in settings more normal than the Nazi concentration camps. It was outrage at the Nazi experiments, however, experiments performed...