Ethics and the study of gender and corruption

The study of corruption raises methodological and ethical challenges. Because corruption involves illegal behavior, scholars must apply heightened scrutiny to their research designs, and to the validity of their results, than in other arenas where illegality is not commonplace. This is both self-protective, as scholars may themselves be liable if they are privy to knowledge about illegal actions, and protective of research subjects from being drawn into illegal behavior by scholar-designed experiments. Finally, there are also ethical concerns involved in making policy recommendations based on research findings, especially when these findings are coming from laboratory settings with undergraduate students. This chapter outlines these ethical concerns and then conducts a stress-test of more than 100 articles that study the relationship between gender and corruption in order to examine the methods and practices of this literature. We find that the vast majority of research on gender and corruption has hitherto used off-the-shelf data. If scholars hope to gain more nuanced understandings of gender and corruption, perhaps through participant observation, interviews, or survey methods meant to uncover sensitive responses in surveys, or even by implementing field experiments, then the demand for ethical scrutiny will be even higher.