Paper short abstract:

Researching pregnancy, childbirth, and sensitive personal information usually requires several steps of ethics checks. Again, respondents may object to disclosure. Even with a disclosure agreement, personal data protection might be complicated. The respondents might hide or improvise original inform

Paper long abstract:

A researcher must adhere to research ethics. Upholding research ethics would be simple when the research does not involve any sensitive personal information. However, when it comes to collecting data on medical issues, complicated pregnancy or childbirth, critical illness, or involving vulnerable adults, there might be three alternative scenarios. The respondents often tend not to participate, respond anonymously, and do not share accurate information or provide improvised responses. All these three scenarios entail three different types of challenges of doing ethical research. When the respondent completely denies participating, it involves additional time and resources to recruit new respondents. Anonymous responses could be dealt with by marking the answer scripts as non-disclosure. However, in this case, respondents would have to completely rely on the research ethics of the researcher, which might put the respondents in a vulnerable position. For the last scenario, the data collection and quality of research is severely hampered. Knowing the fact that the respondents might be manipulating the response, since there is no way to verify the information, the researcher is bound to depend on the saturated response as part of doing responsible research.

This context above presents an ethical dilemma for the researcher between the need to collect authentic data and adhering to research ethics.

Keywords: Ethic challenges, Sensitive information, Research Ethics, Data collection, ethical dilemma.