Ethical Choices in Research – Managing Data, Writing Reports, and Publishing Results in the Social Sciences

This book provides a comprehensive overview of ethical concerns researchers must face after collecting the study data. It teaches readers how to avoid issues related to data management and analysis, the publication process, and the researcher’s obligations after publication.

You have almost completed your research and you are certain that the treatment of human participants was ethically sound. The hefty ethical deliberations are behind you, right? Not quite. In this practical and informative books, Harris Cooper provides an insider’s guidance on the many choices yet to come. Following the course of a typical project, Cooper describes the ethics—and etiquette—behind each stage. He anticipates ethical problems that occur in the early stages of planning research, the middle stages of data management and report preparation, and the final stage of publications. At each stage, he emphasizes the value of early planning to meet one’s professional responsibilities as a scientist.

Harris Cooper is the Hugo L. Blomquist Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University. His lab mostly conducts research syntheses and meta-analyses but also collects primary data in the area of educational policy and practice. He has taught research methods to undergraduate and graduate students for more than 40 years and has edited two handbooks on research methods and a guide to reporting research in psychology. Dr. Cooper served as the editor of Psychological Bulletin and inaugural coeditor (with Gary VandenBos) of the Archives of Scientific Psychology, APA's open-access, collaborative data sharing, open methods journal. After his term as Psychological Bulletin editor, he served for 6 years as the chief editorial advisor (CEA) to the APA journals program.  The CEA acts as a resource for journal editors, authors, and submitters of manuscripts when (a) disputes arise between editors and authors or between authors and other authors and/or (b) concerns are expressed about the scientific integrity of submitted manuscripts and published articles. For 3 years, Dr. Cooper served as chair of the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri–Columbia, and for 5 years he served as chair of the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University.