Research ethics means working with honesty, giving proper attribution, and showing respect for anyone involved in your study. It isn’t paperwork tacked on at the end — it’s the integrity that makes your findings trustworthy and keeps participants safe.

Research is, at bottom, an act of trust. Readers trust that you reported honestly. The people you study trust that you’ll treat them with care. The scholars you build on trust that you’ll credit them. Research ethics is simply taking that trust seriously.

Four commitments

  • Honesty. Report your methods and results truthfully — never invent, never quietly drop the inconvenient findings.
  • Credit. Acknowledge the work you built on; passing others’ ideas off as your own is a serious breach.
  • Respect for people. If your research involves people, they deserve to understand it, to agree freely, and to have their privacy protected.
  • Transparency. Be open about your study’s limits and anything that might colour it.
An ethical decision, in practice
You plan to interview farmers about their incomes. Ethics asks you to: explain the study and get their genuine consent; let them stop any time; anonymise their names when you write up; and keep the data secure. Skip any one of these and you risk real harm — and you undermine the very trust your work depends on.
Try this
Imagine your project involved talking to people. Name two concrete things you’d do to protect them. If both came easily, you’ve already got the instinct ethics is built on.

That completes the fundamentals: a clear question, a sense of the existing conversation, an organised way of working, and the integrity to do it all responsibly. Take a look at the Course Wrap-up when you’re ready — and nicely done.

© FRELIP, released under CC BY 4.0. Curated by the FRELIP Open Courseware editorial team.

Modifié le: vendredi 5 juin 2026, 08:36