The Belmont Report From The US Department Of Health And Human Services

When in the planning and preparation stages of a dissertation, doctoral students have many things to consider, such as how to choose a research topic, how to locate credible literature on the topic, how to collect the data, how to analyze the data, and how to present the findings in the most logical and articulate manner. Two things that are often overlooked are conducting ethical research and best practices in postsecondary research. In an effort to explore both of these concepts in detail, the following discussions will be broken into two parts. Part I will explore the concepts of ethical research involving human subjects, the Belmont Report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the American Educational Research Association

Plagiarism is defined as the act of representing the work of someone else as your own (AERA, 2011; APA, 2010; APA, 2012; Cozby & Bates, 2012; Creswell, 2014). According to Fisher & Partin (2014), there are two forms of plagiarism, which are deliberate and accidental. Deliberate plagiarism is the intentional attempt to pass off the work of someone else as your own, and accidental plagiarism is unknowingly using the work of someone else without proper citation and referencing (Fisher & Partin, 2014). Commonly, plagiarism is thought of as submitting someone else’s work for an essay or school report and can include submitting the entire artifact as your own, or using a small portion of the work, such as paragraph or sentence without properly citing the original author (Cozby & Bates, 2012). Submitting someone else’s work in place of completing the work themselves is an ethical dilemma most students understand; however, oftentimes, students do not understand that it is equally important to cite the ideas of others even when expressed in their own words. This form of plagiarism occurs when an author presents someone else’s ideas as their own, such as providing the discussion about transformational leadership without acknowledging where information about the theory came from (APA, 2010; APA, 2012; Cozby & Bates, 2012). Another ethical dilemma in educational writing is self-plagiarism.

The IRB of NCU works to adhere to the Belmont Report, Title 45, Part 46 of the Code of Federal Regulations, and the Office for Human Research (NCU, 2015d). In adherence with these agencies, NCU supplemental materials stress repeatedly that research of any type, including data collection, any form of contact with potential human subjects, and recruitment of human subjects, cannot begin until approval from the NCU Institutional Review Board (NCU, 2015c, NCU, 2015d). The discussion provided herein assumes the NCU IRB application and supplementary documentation has been completed by the student researcher, and thusly, only addresses the IRB process once the application has been drafted. After the completion of the IRB application, compiling of supplementary documentation, and completion of supplementary checklist, the student researcher submits the documentation to their department chair (DC). The DC submits the student’s application, supplementary material, and checklist to the IRB (NCU, 2015c). Next, the application undergoes an initial review to make sure all materials were received with the application. The initial reviewer uses a checklist to verify the materials submitted, which includes a description of how the data is stored and kept confidential, how any audio files collected will be transcribed and kept