Research Ethics in Cultural Sociology

Cultural sociology, with its plurality and diversity, has transformed the academic fields of sociology and brought new dimensions to the realm of sociological inquiry. It aims to emphasize interpreting social facts and phenomena through linguistic and meaning-centered analysis, cross-cultural studies, and hermeneutical modeling. Regarding the objective, the cultural sociological study is mostly oriented to qualitative research methods including in-depth interviews, participant observation, historical documents, discourse analysis, and ethnography that substantially require the maintenance of ethics in research. The chapter aims to explore ethical considerations and their challenges for cultural sociologists so that researchers can ensure reliability in data collection, validation of data, comprehensible interpretation of credible results, and confirmation of constructing reality. From a systematic literature review, findings infer that biased sample, convenience sampling, ambiguous questionnaire, uninformed consent, unprotected privacy, lack of psychological assessment, and lack of experience among the respondents on the research issues hinder the process of authentic data collection eventually affecting internal validity, external validity, and criterion validity in data, and construct validity in results. For removing the problems, informed consent, re-consent procedure, recursive observation, re-reviewing questionnaire, self-disclosure strategy for privacy, communicative competence, and cognitive bandwidths are suggested. In addition, four types of equivalence (construct, structural, measurement-unit, and scalar equivalence) are recommended for avoiding construct bias, method bias, and item bias existing in the research field so that the universality of results including absoluteness and relativity are confirmed.