Internet research tools and methods - a continuous challenge in the activity of the ethics and deontology commissions

Abstract

The proper functioning of a society is based on the existence of moral and ethical norms to guide social behavior. For this reason, different branches of ethics developed to study the human behavior, the questions we need to ask when making decisions and the meaning of ethical values and their role in justifying a decision and guiding our professional activity. Just as research is vital to the development ofsociety and the understanding of social trends, everyday problems and needs, it seems that research must exist only in the frames of ethics so as to provide objective knowledge and not to harm. However, our rapprochement to the internet in the last 20 years raised newchallenges for research ethics, such as: demonstrating the veracity of information without compromising the participants’ identities, defining a community in the online space, etc.In the light of these events, our study focuses on the value of ethical behavior in research, examines the contemporary ethical challenges in research, and proposes solutions to address them. For this, we analyze researchers’ behavior online, and its implications in treating the research subjects, defining and choosing the ethical methods to approach them, and the capacity to guarantee the destruction of data. We end this study with a proposal for an ethical model of decision-making in research based on a deontological approach.