The brief paper provides and discusses a case in which a researcher violates some ethical standard. The case involves a student working on his doctoral degree who is testing a new math program at a large local elementary school to determine whether the program improves students math abilities. The research methodology involved random assignment of 200 fourth and fifth grade students to either the new math program or a control group. The control group did not receive the new math program. Within one week of beginning the study, the student was contacted by the Principal and told that parents in the control group were very angry that their children were not receiving the new math program and wanted the situation rectified. Moreover, they had gotten together with some of the children whose parents were receiving the special math program and had a discussion about it, some of it unpleasant.
Based on Creswell's (1998) discussion of ethical standards in research, it can be seen that the doctoral student's primary ethnical violation in this study is that he allowed parents and students to find out which of the children had participated in the various groups, a breach of the ethical principle of confidentiality. Indeed, not only were the students in the study and control groups identified, but the parents were allowed to congregate and confront one another.
It is possible that this breach may not only have gotten parents upset but may have set the children in the group up to ridicule and teasing from peers. What the doctoral student could do to avoid such programs in the future might be to devise the study with the caveat that any programs or program components found to be successful would be shared with all students, not just those in the study group.
In addition, the doctoral student could have avoided this problem all together by designing the study as a "blind test" in which both groups of students were exposed to some
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