Recommendations for good practice in research

Please find below the Recommendations for good practice in research, taken from the British Association for Applied Linguistics (2000) Recommendations

1. General responsibility to informants

You should respect the rights, interests, sensitivities and privacy of people who provide you with your data (“informants”). You should think about and respect all aspects of identity including their culture, gender and age. On the basis of this, try to anticipate any harmful effects or disruptions to informants’ lives and environment, and to avoid any stress, intrusion, and real or perceived exploitation.

2. Obtaining informed consent

You must get permission from anyone who provides you with data, whether spoken or written. To do this, you should let informants know anything about your project that might affect their willingness to participate: what your objectives are, what you will need from them, how much time it will take, and how you will keep their identities confidential, if that is necessary. When informants are under the age of 19, you also need their parents’ permission too.

3. Respecting a person’s decision not to participate.

Informants have the right to refuse to participate in research, even if they said at the outset that they would. It is best to plan your project so that it does not depend entirely on the consent of one or two people.

4. Confidentiality and anonymity.

If you have not been given the right to identify participants, they must not be identifiable in any way (confidentiality) and in particular you must not use real names (anonymity). You should try to anticipate ways identities might accidentally be revealed: by including identifying details, pictures, or moving images, playing voices, or allowing unauthorised access to data on your computer or in your files.

5. Deception and covert research

Deception is unacceptable because it violates the principles of informed consent and the right to privacy. When researchers do not want informants to alter their usual style of speech, and anticipate they might do so if they know the purpose of the study, it may be defensible

to tell them the general purpose of the research without revealing specific objectives
to ask them to agree to be deceived at some unspecified time in the future (for example if there is going to be a role play)
(if there is no alternative) to explain the research immediately after
gathering the data, and ask for permission then. But if they do not give permission then, you will have to destroy the data without using it (and they may be very angry).

While deception is unacceptable, distraction is generally ethical. Distraction might involve introducing multiple activities into a study to prevent informants monitoring themselves, for example, in linguistic research, asking them to tell about an event in their lives, when what you are interested in is not the story but the language they use.

6. Sponsors and users

If your academic project is done in co-operation with an agency, group or company in the community, you must usually provide an account of your work that is useful to the user. In turn, they must understand that you have to be evaluated on your work as an academic project, and must meet academic deadlines and standards.