Paper Title
Ethics Issues Regarding the Communication Process with Participants in a Marketing Research
Abstract
Ethics in marketing research is not a recent topic, specialists discussing it from a long time, being concerned first of all about participants’ rights and how their violation may affect the quality of data. With the passage of time, the ethical problems in research have multiplied and worsened, which is why today almost all research bodies have very strict ethical codes. This being said, we see the need for a current analysis on researcher perspective on these ethical codes of conduct. The present article debates the ethical perspective on one of the most important part of the research process - the communication with participants. For this reason, we have conducted a quantitative research among academic researchers from Romania’s top economic university, the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, with three segments: professors, doctoral students and postgraduate students. The main results of the research show a concern of the researchers for respecting the rights of the participants in the research, by informing them beforehand where participation involved questioning them, as well as informing them after data collection where the research involved observing people in the natural environment. One part of the research world that gains more and more importance nowadays is the use of social media data, where the ethics are relatively overlooked, as almost half of the researchers don’t inform people about their inclusion in studies.
Keywords - Ethics, Academic Research, Quantitative Research, Privacy.