Researchers in a range of investigative fields, including sexology, share a common commitment to maintaining the welfare, dignity, rights, well-being, and safety of their human subjects. Detailed lists of ethical guidelines have been prepared by a number of professional organizations, including the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Medical Association (AMA), and the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS).
The ethical guidelines require, among other things, that no pressure or coercion be applied to ensure the participation of volunteers in research and that researchers avoid procedures that might cause physical or psychological harm to human subjects. Researchers need to obtain informed consent from participants before conducting an experiment. Obtaining informed consent involves explaining the general purpose of the
Sex Research: Methods and Problems
study and each participant’s rights as a subject, including the voluntary nature of participation and the potential costs and benefits of participation (Kuyper et al., 2011; Seal et al., 2000). Researchers must also respect a subject’s right to refuse to participate at any time during the course of a study. In addition, special steps must be taken to protect the confidentiality of the data and to maintain participants’ anonymity unless they agree to be identified (Margolis, 2000).
The issue of deception in research remains controversial. Some studies would lose their effectiveness if participating subjects knew in advance exactly what the experimenter was studying. The ethical guideline generally applied to this issue is that if deception must be used, a postexperiment debriefing must thoroughly explain to participants why the deception was necessary. At that time, subjects must be allowed to request that their data be removed from the study and destroyed.
An extreme example of violating ethical guidelines occurred in the 1940s when U. S. researchers deliberately injected thousands of Guatemalans with sexually transmitted infections (STIs) such as gonorrhea and syphilis (Walter, 2012). These injections, which occurred without accompanying warnings, were integral to research designed to provide ways to prevent STIs. Between 1946 and 1948, U. S. government researchers experimented without consent on more than 5,000 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, prostitutes, orphans, and people with psychiatric disorders. Many of these unwitting participants suffered from severe symptoms of STIs, some for a lifetime. These experiments, ethically unconscionable, were uncovered in 2010 and subsequently condemned by U. S. health officials as being "repugnant and abhorrent."
Sometimes it is hard for researchers to weigh objectively the potential benefits of a study against the possibility of harming subjects. In recognition of this difficulty, virtually every institution conducting research in the United States has established an ethics committee that reviews all proposed studies. If committee members perceive that the subjects’ welfare is insufficiently safeguarded, the proposal must be modified or the research cannot be conducted. In addition, federal funding for research is denied to any institution that fails to conduct an adequate ethics committee review before data collection begins.