Two general ethical principles followed in nursing that can be discussed as tantamount to conducting the research involving human subjects are the respect for person and human dignity and truth telling. It is possible to state that these ethical principles are directly related to the ethics of the research involving human subjects because the principle of the respect for person and human dignity is correlated with the idea of the informed consent, and the principle of truth telling is associated with the idea of comprehension and voluntariness in the context of the nursing research involving human subjects.
In their practice, nurses should follow the ethical principle of autonomy which is formulated as the respect for person and human dignity. As a result, while conducting the research with human subjects, nurses should receive the participants’ informed consent stating that persons are ready to be observed during the research and that they allow their participation because they understand the research’s purposes (Menikoff, 2013, p. 290). Human subjects should know why they are involved in the research, and they should receive guarantees that they will not be manipulated while participating in the project.
In this case, it is important to speak about the correlation of ethical principles of truth telling with the principles of informed consent, comprehension, and voluntariness. To participate in the research, human subjects should understand their specific role in the study and all possible consequences (Polit & Beck, 2012, p. 152).
The researcher should inform human subjects about the purposes of the research and its origins in order to guarantee comprehension and voluntariness regarding the participation in the research. Truth telling associated with the principle of comprehension means that researchers should adapt the information about the study in order to provide the human subjects with the opportunity to understand and agree with all details of the research (Napier, 2013, p. 30).
In this case, the nurse researcher follows the ethical principle of truth telling. The idea of truth telling associated with nursing ethics can often be discussed as contradicting to the purpose of the nursing research. In this situation, it is possible to observe the ethical dilemma which needs to be resolved by the nurse researcher in order to conduct the study with references to ethical norms. Therefore, general ethical principles are directly connected with the research ethics regarding the situation when nurse researchers need to work with human subjects.
References
Menikoff, J. (2013). Research involving human subjects: Ethical and regulatory issue. HCN, 118(1), 289-299.
Napier, S. (2013). Challenging research on human subjects: Justice and uncompensated harms. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 34(1), 29-51.
Polit, D., & Beck, C. (2012). Nursing research: Generating and assessing evidence for nursing practice. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins.