Primum non nocere – First, do no harm.

I’ve wondered before about this adage because I naturally tend to assume that only a sociopath would ever enter a situation planning to harm anther being. Yet this protective principle is found front and center in the code of ethics of most professions, as it is in James McMillan’s “top ten” aspects of ethical concerns for educational researchers. I suggest that it is absolutely appropriate for professions and organizations to keep it in focus, not because it is a natural approach (at least for the psychologically stable) but because it is a universal principle whose operational definition is easily comprehended.

So what does it mean for us as educational researchers to 'do no harm'? To me, it means that we take utmost care to identify the implicit risks, the explicit risks and all of our stakeholders prior to conducting and designing research. Explicit risks are the obvious physical threats or psychological dangers that might be posed by our presence, by coercive techniques, by our withholding of important truths, or simply put, our negligence. The implicit risks are the “harm” that might be caused by our lack of planning or forethought, or our failure to make contingency plans. And beyond the need to manage risks, we have to exhaustively discover all of our stakeholders which I think is harder and takes longer than expected.

Using my research problem to illustrate this responsibility, I have to start first with the participants that I sample, namely the teachers who are compensated via performance incentives as well as those in the control group who are paid straight salary. In addition to the participants directly measured, I will require resources in the form of both data and time from their administrators, from their Human Resources support staff and from their district leadership. And beyond them, I can identify the other stakeholders as the students in their classrooms, their families, their communities, and the school budgets that pay them. All of these parties will be directly impacted by my research and certainly by any incremental change in performance or behavior that results from my presence or the conclusions that my research supports. Unless I take great care to identify all of the stakeholders involved in the system I intend to research, I cannot ever fully manage the risks of my methods.

Another ethical responsibility that McMillan mentions and about which I feel strongly is the role of the investigator in maintaining the confidentiality of the participants and the propriety of the study. To me, this means ensuring that data and records are protected and planning for all contingencies necessary to safeguard them, regardless of the financial and physical resources required. The researcher is also responsible for ensuring the work is all unique or is properly cited if not. As well, in the end, she must guarantee that the design, the data, the methods, the results and the conclusions are fully transparent and fully explained.

In this, I arrive full circle at the original, overriding guideline and to share a concluding operational definition. ‘To do no harm’ means to always leave the participants, their communities, and fellow researchers in a better place than where you found them. Even if my data reveals that performance pay does not impact the organizational citizenship behaviors of teachers, this conclusion can still in some way benefit those leaders who make educational policy on behalf of our children.