ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the ethical issues faced by graduate researchers in the course of conducting their educational research from a justice perspective. It discusses the researchers’ reflections on ethical issues relating to the recruitment of students and colleagues and the provision of incentives to participants, and dilemmas between meeting participants’ requests for educational help and protecting the scientific integrity of their projects. Drawing on justice concepts such as distributive justice, equity and reciprocity, and their application in biomedical research ethics as a heuristic, the chapter provides ethical justifications for the researchers’ responses to the issues or suggests alternative actions they could have taken. The chapter also draws a link between fair treatment of participants in educational research and virtue ethics. It argues for the need for researchers involved in human subject research, both biomedical and non-biomedical, to engage in reflective and reflexive thinking. This will enable them to respond in a virtuous and principled manner to the day-to-day uncertainties of research ethics in practice.
