Human ethics review and social sciences: several emerging ethical issues.

The extension of ethical review to research in the social sciences and humanities has raised a number of new issues for Institutional Ethics Committees. The emergent issues discussed here are: the relationship between subject and researcher, the use of data to which employment gives access, the impact of questionnaires, the impact of sampling techniques, the impact of observation, when the subject is an organisation, and conflicting rights to research. These issues underscore the importance of IECs maintaining a flexible and watchful oversight of research and the impossibility of a simple clutch of rules to guide ethical research in this domain.