The Importance Of Ethics Protocols

Ethics protocols are designed to protect groups from the potential harm and risks posed to them through the research process. Boards, like the Institutional Review Board (IRB), put in place a set of criteria to ensure the protection of people participating in research, particularly those from vulnerable groups. However, where lies the balance between conducting unbiased enlightening research and protecting the dependent?

Describing a group as vulnerable is not a given, but rather, is up for debate. Predetermining a group as being vulnerable can bias the inquiry and discourage research on the group to start with. This research may be a crucial insight on the lives of certain groups to promote equality, or even provide answers as to why certain groups are more susceptible to certain diseases than others. If you decide to do research on a group labeled vulnerable, the inability to ask some of the questions needed results in bias based on socialized views of a group. In her study of …show more content…
The IRB should not control all research by the same strict set of rules as there are many people in certain groups that are more than capable of making decisions themselves. But at the same time, there are people that need protection because they are vulnerable. In order to allow the best quality research and protect the participant at the same time there needs to be a set of rules but they should not predetermine a whole group of people as vulnerable. The IRB should operate on an understanding that the language of their protocols be continually open to interpretation and dialogue and debate. Shutting down language between people is shutting down understanding, as language is one of the biggest tools we use in order to sympathize with others. Researchers need to understand how ethics shape their work to produce the best knowledge possible when conducting research with human