Introduction
Research is an integral part of the scientific community, playing a significant role in the social sciences and other disciplines. However, when conducting research, scholars must adhere to specific ethical considerations to ensure the reliability of the results and compliance with laws. In the case of Sudhir Venkatesh, essential ethical considerations were overlooked during the conduct of the study. Therefore, due to oversights in ethical aspects, Professor Venkatesh’s research yielded unreliable results and posed a risk to participants.
Ethical Violations in Professor Venkatesh’s Research
Informed Consent
From the beginning, the reader can see Professor Venkatesh’s approach. The man claims he approached strangers with a questionnaire and asked, “How does it feel to be black and poor?” as part of a study project (Kaminer, 2012, p. 2). In this situation, the researcher violated the principles of informed consent. This involves “agreeing to participate in research after being informed about goals, procedures, and potential risks” (Maxfield & Babbie, 2014, p.71). As a result, this severely violates ethical standards, since the people interviewed did not agree to participate.
Regarding the impact on research, it was a crime, as a lack of informed consent constitutes malpractice from a scientific perspective, and the results are, therefore, not valid. Aside from this, the findings may not be credible since, without proper consent and voluntary participation, respondents could provide inaccurate information, which poses a risk to the research results.
Privacy
Another ethical issue in Professor Venkatesh’s research is poor confidentiality and anonymity. According to Professor Williams, who was in charge of the research project, researchers must “change names of people [they] don’t want to be harmed if the authorities got ahold of [their] manuscript” (Kaminer, 2012, p.4). Still, there were several concerns that he was being somewhat dishonest about many of his studies (Kaminer, 2012). As per ethical standards, researchers are responsible for “protecting the privacy of individuals by limiting the use of private, identifiable information for research or statistical purposes” (Maxfield & Babbie, 2014, p.65). Such a mistake is also a violation of the law, and the findings of such a study are unreliable.
Reliability
Finally, there is a concern regarding the veracity of the information provided by Venkatesh. Nearly three dozen individuals who were recruited for this piece, including friends, coworkers, and students, expressed concerns regarding the method used by Professor Venkatesh to turn his research into best-selling literature (Kaminer, 2012). For instance, despite his admission that he seldom ever made records in real-time, the book contains page after page of conversation that is presented within quotation marks and reads as though it were verbatim (Kaminer, 2012). This violates the ethical standard of private information protection and could imply that much of the data resulted from the professor’s imagination, as mentioned by one of his peers (Kaminer, 2012). As a result, Venkatesh’s data suffered due to failure to comply with ethical standards and might be unreliable due to a lack of transparency.
Conclusion
Hence, Professor Venkatesh’s research produced no conclusive findings because of ethical flaws, which also put subjects in danger. The researcher first disregarded the rules of informed consent. Poor secrecy and anonymity in Professor Venkatesh’s study are other ethical problems. Last but not least, there is a question about the accuracy of Venkatesh’s data. Thus, the professor’s data suffered due to a lack of credibility and law compliance.
References
Kaminer, A. (2012). Columbia’s gang scholar lives on the edge. The New York Times.
Maxfield, M. G., & Babbie, E. R. (2014). Research methods for criminal justice and criminology (7th ed.). Cengage Learning.