February 25

Today we talked about ethics in a make-up class that I went to.
We talked about unethical research that has been performed in the past. A lot of these experiments taught us a lot, like the physicians who performed experiments on people in the Nuremberg trials. But, these experiments amoung others have ethical issues in that many of these people were forced into the experiments, were uninformed of what was really going on and many people died during the process.
Although none of our projects are going to be like this, we still have to consider ethical issues. We do have to get approval from IRB but we still have to make sure that out in the field we are being ethical to other humans.
For my project, the ethical concern I thought of was that I'm researching other people, and my findings might contradict how they feel and think about themselves and I might write things that are wrong in my speculations. In order to help solve this, I am going to make sure I show my notes to people I interview and write about so that they can look over it and make sure it is actually representative of what they say and how they live their lives.
I can't really know what other ethical things I might run into in Tonga considering I have never been there, but it's important to know where I stand and remember who I represent when I go there. I have to be able to make decisions on what I think is ethical and act accordingly. Even I am faced with the choice of doing something that might be unethical, I know I don't have to take the chance and I can be safe and choose not to do it if I am unsure.