Key princples for research

 

1. Research should be open and public

It is a basic requirement for academic research to be public, explicit and accessible. Ideally the criteria of openness also should include researchers making the values on which their research is based explicit and open for discussion. In this way openness is a basic prerequisite for scrutinising research, not just in terms of its theoretical and methodological assumptions but also when it concerns value laden aspects. The latter is important since science rests on fundamental assumptions and an epistemology, ie. the foundation of knowledge, that are neither proven nor provable by themselves.

In short, the criterion of openness means that anyone, scientists as well as lay persons, should be able to examine research findings and evaluate or scrutinise them. But it also means that research should be transparent to a degree that makes it meaningful to ask questions like: "Do the explanations follow logically from the assumptions?" "Does empirical evidence support the generalisations and the conclusions?" "Have some kind of values or social and cultural norms biased the findings?" "Are the observations valid and reliable?" and so forth.

2. Research should be in accordance with ethical values and norms

Research problems dealt with in the social, behavioural and humanistic sciences originate in a specific socio-political and cultural context, which in turn influences researchers' considerations and decisions. An important dimension of this context concerns the ethics of research. Ethical issues arise from both the problems social researchers investigate and the methods they use to obtain data. As a general rule there are no easily found right or wrong answers to these ethical dilemmas. Nevertheless, it is the obligation of any research project carefully to consider and explicate its own ethical implications.

This also includes research projects being reviewed by the standards of academic ethical statutes and codes before they start.

These standards could include: research involving humans should be performed with the informed consent of the participants and should not violate their rights to privacy, eg. by protecting their anonymity and keeping research data confidential. Furthermore, that any deviance from those principles or deception used by researchers, eg. masking the identity or the purpose of the research, should be strongly motivated in ethical terms.

Ultimately even the criterion of openness is ethically and politically motivated, in the sense that it rests on a democratic claim that all research reports should be public documents, freely available to everyone.

3. Research should be relevant

The ethical dimension of research overlaps with questions about its social, political and cultural relevance.

The most obvious criterion for the relevancy of research is that it contributes to the solution of widely felt or urgent societal problems. However, it is much harder to reach a broad consensus on the relevance of research than on its ethical guidelines. The values that different individuals, groups or categories attach to the benefit of social, behavioural or humanistic research depend on and vary with a complex set of factors, ie. their social backgrounds or positions, political convictions, and experiences in general. Although such differences make it hard to reach broad or complete agreement, judgements of relevancy are important for the initiation or realisation of any research. From this point of view questions concerning the relevance of research ought to be regulated by the degree of consent in broad political and/or scientific communities that are not governed by partial interests.