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The rights of research subjects must not be violated, but the protection of research subjects should not distort research results or lead to breaches of scientific openness. At least four reasons can be offered for being cautious in applying medical guidelines as such within other disciplines: 1. Interventions studied in typical medical research are much more invasive than typical social research. 2. The impact of medical and social research on research subjects involves quite different causal chains. 3. The relationship between research subjects and a sociologist carrying out a study of social power resembles the relationship between a journalist and a minister more closely than that of a doctor and a patient. 4. There are important differences between research processes in medicine and social sciences, particularly in qualitative studies. In social research, research designs are more open-ended. Detailed information does not always improve the position of research participants. In social research, a few sentences often suffice to describe what the research is about. Researchers must not harm their research subjects, but they need not benefit them. No such promises should be made to research subjects that narrow the scope of scientific openness. The interpretation of informed consent should not impede the use of the data in further research. Research benefits and data-protection risks need to be weighed against each other. The researcher should have a right to gather data with an accuracy that is too high to allow the data to be published. Among group level consequences of social research, attention should only be paid to unfair consequences. The legal protection of the confidentiality of datasets in behavioural sciences needs to be improved. Qualitative research plans should specify how the data will be preserved, anonymised and archived.

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