Chapter Summary

This chapter outlines, with examples, typical ethical issues in communication research and summarizes major relevant codes of ethics and institutional approval processes in the form of institutional review boards.

Chapter Objectives

This chapter will help you:

• Identify major ethics issues in human communication research.
• Explain some of the classic ethical positions that inform communication research.
• Describe some of the major contemporary codes of ethics.
• Discuss the concepts of peer review and of institutional review boards.
• Describe how the level of involvement with research participants can shape a researcher’s relationship with them.
• Identify some of the ethical issues unique to researching human communication on the Internet.