The following scenarios are similar to those you saw in Chapter 1, but bear directly on the rights of respondents in a research study. As before, your assignment is to decide what action to take in each instance. Be prepared to justify your decision.

1. Your company is supervising a study of restaurants conducted for the Department of Corporate and Consumer Affairs. The data, which have already been collected, included specific buying information and prices paid. Respondent organizations have been promised confidentiality. The ministry demands that all responses be identified by business name. Their rationale is that they plan to repeat the study and wish to limit sampling error by returning to the same respondents. Open bidding requires that the government maintain control of the sample.

What action would you take?

2. You are a project director on a study funded by a somewhat unpopular federal policing agency. The study is on marijuana use among young people in a community and
its relationship, if any, to crime. You will be using a structured questionnaire to gather data for the agency on marijuana use and criminal activities. You believe that if you reveal the name of the funding agency and/or the actual purposes of the study to respondents, you will seriously depress response rates and thereby increase nonresponse bias.

What information would you disclose to respondents?

3. You are employed by a market research company. A manufacturer of female clothing has retained your firm to conduct a study for them. The manufacturer wants you to know something about how women choose clothing, such as blouses and sweaters. The manufacturer wants to conduct group interviews, supplemented by a session which would be devoted to observing the women trying on clothing, in order to discover which types of garments are chosen first, how thoroughly they touch and examine the clothing, and whether they look for and read a label or price tag. The client suggests that the observations be performed unobtrusively by female observers at a local department store, via a one-way mirror. One of your associates argues that this would constitute an invasion of privacy.

What action would you take?

4. You are the market research director in a manufacturing company. The project director requests permission to use ultraviolet ink in precoding questionnaires on a mail survey. Although the accompanying letter refers to a confidential survey, the project director needs to be able to identify respondents to permit adequate cross-tabulation of the data and to save on postage costs if a second mailing is required.

What action would you take?