Megha Majumder

SA #4, Soc 5

In lecture, we brought up the ethical issues of confidentiality and informed consent.

Confidentiality is the mandatory clearly-stated guarantee from a researcher to their subject that

whatever information the subject provided cannot be attributed back to the subject. Nobody,

except perhaps the researcher, can figure out the identity of the subject. Informed consent is also

a mandatory provision for researchers, in that they must provide participants of their study with

sufficient information for them to make an informed and voluntary decision to be apart of the

research. The information has to include the purpose of the research, duration, procedures,

information about being able to decline, consequences, risks involved in participating, benefits,

incentives, and who to go to for further information.

Waters encountered a number of ethical dilemmas, among which included informed

consent and confidentiality. She had to find a way to preserve her and her interviewers’ personal

safety, which went with maintaining confidentiality, and actually paid off her respondents which

is questionable because the way she described it, it felt like a bribe. She experienced an issue

with providing informed consent, as well, to certain families. In explaining the project to

interviewees, she told them that she was studying the experience of New Yorkers with

immigration in both the past and present. She said that asking the blacks and whites about their

own family histories, they were more at east and less likely to worry that she was trying to figure

out if they were races. However, this is wrong because is kind of what she was trying to do; thus,

she was hiding her true intent.

 An additional ethical issue that struck me was her ‘street sample’ data, in which she

authorized interviews of minors without parental consent, which she promised the IRBs she

wouldn’t do. However, she needed to interview students to have a sense of the range of

experiences among the second generation, and couldn’t go through the schools. The street

sample consisted of drug dealers or kids who dropped out of school. I believe that this was not

right, because she violated the IRB and essentially exploited the kids for her research.