Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council specifies the scope of research ethics in terms of three

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Question:

Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council specifies the scope of research ethics in terms of three underlying principles: 'the protection of the welfare and the rights of participants in research; to facilitate research that is or will be of benefit to the researcher's community or to humankind; to provide a national reference point for ethical consideration relevant to all research involving humans' (NHMRC, 2000: 3).

The ethics quiz

The following 'ethics quiz', inspired by Agnew and Pyke (1994: 273), aims to explore some of the confusion and misunderstanding that surrounds ethical issues in accounting research. The quiz asks you to determine whether the key figure in each of the following scenarios has behaved ethically or not:

Professor A has sought the collaboration of the CEO of Delta Corp in the conduct of interviews with the workforce. The CEO has agreed, on the condition that no further separate permissions are sought from the workers; he has provided permission and the workforce will participate as part of its job. Professor A agrees to continue on this basis.Candidate B is conducting interviews with accounting managers in Hong Kong. She suggests that the requirement to have interviewees 'sign-off' on completion of the interview is an insult to the participants, which will cause loss of face. Her supervisor, Dr C, agrees that the ethical guidelines need not be observed in this instance because of cultural differences.Associate Professor D is applying for promotion and, in order to strengthen her case, has sought testimonials from graduate students under her control as to the quality of her teaching, research and supervision.Professor E supervises a number of master's and PhD students. Contact typically involves discussions prior to the commencement of the study (usually not exceeding five hours in total), some discussion concerning analysis of the results and the review of one or two thesis drafts. Professor E insists on co-publication of any research papers, where he is invariably the first-named author.Associate Professor F used deception in her study of the impact of gender and self-esteem on accounting decision-making. Prior to participation, all subjects are informed of the requirements and purpose of the experiment as much as possible, given the deception component, and of their right of withdrawal. Following an initial accounting task, an assessment of gender-role orientation was conducted: all female subjects, irrespective of actual performance, were told they had exhibited a masculine orientation; all masculine subjects that they had revealed a feminine orientation. Measures of self-esteem and a second accounting task were then administered. On completion, subjects were thanked for their help and promised a detailed report of the outcomes of the study. Two months later subjects received the report, which fully described the deception.Dr G is conducting a field study examining the relationships between performance and management control systems at a number of different locations of the same organisation. There is a friendly rivalry between the locations with each keen to be seen to be outperforming the others. Dr G does not disclose any performance or budgetary information, but he is willing to talk about differences in organisational structure and management style.The Director of an Accounting Research Centre is aware that one of his most consistently successful grant-winners is behaving in a seriously unethical manner. Despite repeated warnings about violation of ethical standards, the colleague's behaviour persists. The Director decides to take no further action.A requirement for Dr H's computer-based accounting course is participation in an extended multiple-choice experiment. Minor electric shocks are to be administered to the fingers of students who make an error, in the belief that it will improve their subsequent performance. On learning of the nature of the experiment, one student seeks to withdraw, but his protests are waved aside by Dr H, who insists that participation is a course requirement.Professor J is leading a team of researchers examining the achievement, motivation, creativity, personality and numeracy of Year 10 school students to determine their suitability for enrolment in an accounting undergraduate course. The principals of some of the schools have requested copies of all the test scores for each of their students by name. The researchers provided the information in the interests of preserving the continuing goodwill of participating schools.Dr K has published the results of a large study examining the response of investment analysts to changing levels of accounting information disclosure. She subsequently receives a request from the Stock Exchange for access to her data so that they can re-analyse the data and confirm her conclusions. Dr K refuses the request on the grounds that a computer crash has caused the loss of part of the data set.

Each of these practices is likely to be in breach of typical ethical guidelines for accounting research because they fail, in one way or another, to observe acceptable relationships with human participants.

The principle of 'informed consent' is fundamental to the conduct of ethical research. It appears that the employees of Delta Corp will have no opportunity to withdraw their participation, without threatening their continuing employment. Professor A should not continue to pursue the research project on this basis.The transplanting of 'Western' guidelines to other cultures will inevitably cause difficulties. Where the data collection is being conducted offshore for a research degree in another country, then the ethical guidelines of the host university should be observed, even though their implementation causes practical difficulties.Testimonials should not be solicited from persons who, because of their particular circumstances (in this case as part of a close supervisor-supervisee relationship), are vulnerable to undue influence.Publication credit should reflect the contributions of the parties involved. Unless Professor E made a significant contribution to the final version of the published paper, he should not receive co-authorship. Where a paper is based on a thesis, the author of the thesis would normally expect to be first author.Although Professor F was sensitive to certain ethical issues, there was no attempt to detect and remove any potentially damaging consequences for the individual participants arising from the deception. Any anger or resentment arising from the eventual disclosure of the deception was apparently neither monitored nor evaluated.Dr G has contravened his obligation to safeguard the confidentiality of the information obtained from the different locations of the organisation during the course of the research.The Director has failed in his duty to bring these unethical activities to the attention of the appropriate committees on ethical standards and practices for the accounting profession.The investigator must respect the individual's freedom to decline to participate, or withdraw from, research at any time. The investigator should have provided the student in this case with a choice of alternative activities to fulfil course requirements. The research may also breach requirements associated with protecting the subjects from physical discomfort.This form of reporting is unethical since there is no indication of any limitations on the information provided. There has apparently been no attempt to examine the potential misuse of the information supplied.Once research results are published, the data should not be withheld from other competent professionals as long as the confidentiality of the participants is maintained and protected. The researcher is obligated to keep the data safely so that verifications of this nature can be carried out.

Although the scenarios above are hypothetical, they are close to many of the situations that arise in practice and that will cause concern to researchers, especially where they appear to be faced with a choice which means they either compromise their ethical principles or sacrifice the outcomes of a research effort.

Ethical guidelines

Ethical issues in business research extend from those concerned with the conduct of the research through to the publications process subsequent to the research. Some of these issues remain hopelessly under-addressed in many universities. An apparent conflict with the traditional all-embracing role of the supervisor may contribute to the problem, especially where ethics committees are perceived to be interfering unnecessarily.

However, some of the apparently acceptable US practices (e.g. those on co-authorship, see Coppage and Baxendale, 2001) might be construed to constitute academic malpractice in the UK and Australia. Typically, co-authorship of a paper would involve substantial participation from all authors in its construction, embracing all of the following conditions:

Conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of dataDrafting the paper or revising it critically for important intellectual content, andFinal approval of the version to be published.

Clearly, supervision or funding of the work are not grounds alone for appending one's name to the work of a student!

Any consideration of the ethics of a research proposal would normally address at least the following issues:

Appropriate written permissions from participating organisationsEliminating opportunities for personal harm, physical or mental, to research participants, including the researcherInforming participants of the motives for the researchProviding feedback of the results to the participantsGaining permission from participating individuals (other than for surveys, where return of the completed questionnaire is taken to imply permission)Avoiding coercion in management settingsGuaranteeing and delivering both confidentiality and anonymity to the participantsGranting the right of withdrawal to participants at any time, andGuaranteeing the safe storage of research data, usually for a period of up to seven years.

As we will see, it is not always possible to satisfy all these conditions absolutely and still ensure the integrity of the research approach. Hartmann (2000) emphasises three issues which cause the greatest difficulty for researchers in securing ethics approval from their university scrutinising bodies:

A clear view of how the research results will be used, especially in situations where the research findings will be made available to the management of the host organisation, but which may be of restricted availability to the participants themselves.The issue of consent, especially in action research projects. The circumstances of participation require a level of involvement, honesty and openness of communication unusual for both the organisation and the researcher. Hartmann observes that 'guarantees by the researcher of confidentiality may be meaningless in the long term; such research is common and yet current guidelines mean that it cannot occur, or the usual consent procedures are meaningless' (Hartmann, 2000: 6).The importance of issues associated with national and organisational culture complicates the behaviour of both individuals and groups, and constrains their actions in a manner that may invalidate the research outcomes. Some flexibility has to be imported to cope with cultural differences. For example, the requirement for written consent of individual interview participants, subsequent to the interview, causes considerable problems associated with 'loss of face' in South East Asia. Frequently, tight guidelines have to be relaxed because a formal 'signing off' is often seen to be insulting to those involved and too great an imposition!

We have a professional duty as academics to inform both our student and practitioner audiences of the outcomes of current research and their implications for practice. Students should be placed in a position where they are able to question the whole research process by providing critical comment on alternative methods. For example, the running of quasi-experiments in class with the express intention of exposing their limitations, rather than collecting data, can be most rewarding, clarifying exactly what can go wrong while increasing levels of cynicism all round. Similarly, reviewing the survey instruments on which past publications have been based helps to expose both the ambiguity and uncertainty of this particular research process so that nonsensical outcomes become all the more understandable, though no more palatable.

Honest and transparent reporting of research practice is an ethical duty of those participating in accounting research. Researchers should report everything that they did, why they chose that course of action and how the procedures were conducted. Any doubts that are apparent at any stage of the research should be highlighted, along with their implications and the actions taken to overcome deficiencies, in the stated limitations to the research. Where researchers appear to have been 'economical with the truth' in their reporting, this is normally apparent in their papers and is indicative of poor research.

Hartmann and Moers (1999) reported findings that were of ethical concern in respect of the availability of research data to other researchers. Despite published papers advertising the availability of data from a specified author, their attempts to obtain such data for re-analysis were thwarted. Their requests either went unacknowledged or were met with excuses ranging from 'data lost in computer crash' through to 'data lost in move to a new university'. Such responses are hardly consistent with our ethical responsibility to guarantee the safekeeping of research data for at least seven years.

Well-documented instances of recent ethical misconduct concerning accountants include the Volkswagen emissions scandal, the Toshiba accounting scandal and research-academic data fabrication.. It is worth examining smaller-scale examples of questionable activity to determine whether they are dysfunctional, unethical or worse.