Covert Participant Observation Previous Page Ethics
"You can cut off my right hand if you think I'm lying. Oh. You just did..."There are ethical problems involved in covert observation, ranging from the fact that by spying on people you are not being entirely honest with them (you are, in a sense, exploiting them for your own ends) to the problem of suddenly ceasing to involve yourself in the lives of people who may have grown to like, trust and depend on you.

Thus, for Parker ("A View From The Boys") an ethical problem was the extent to which researchers should deceive people by pretending to be "one of them". Parker, for example, chose to withhold some data from publication and discussed publication of certain information with the gang members (he left the final decision over some matters with them). His main concern was that his research did not harm gang members. This may resolve ethical problems, but raises the problem of not being able to give a full account of the behaviour studied.