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This chapter responds to Matt Sleat’s chapter on appropriate ethical regulation for the social sciences (2017). I argue that research is a social practice which brings the researcher into relationships with a variety of institutional and individual actors including, but not limited to, research participants. In this context, I consider the range of ethical duties which may arise and the principles and values which may usefully underpin the conduct of social science research. In particular, I argue that the biomedical model should not be discarded but can be built upon to produce a more appropriate ethical framework for the social sciences.

This chapter provides a response to the chapter ‘Responsible to Whom? Obligations to Participants and Society in Social Science Research’ by Matt Sleat (2017). I outline precisely why principles of decision making in medicine and the biomedical research ethics model do not easily transfer for use in the social sciences. In particular I urge against the social researcher moving from ‘thought’ (contributing to knowledge) to ‘action’ – which could have political consequences and create a fundamental change in disposition towards the researcher’s role in society.

In this chapter I explore the issues of whose interest and rights are at stake when social scientists conduct their research. I caution that the ethical considerations, values and principles that pertain to the social sciences are not always the same as those which rightly underpin the biomedical sciences and so not all should be imported. In particular I consider the dangers of applying a ‘participant protection model’ to social science research. I suggest that the social sciences must be regulated through a framework that understands and enables these differences rather than misconstrues and hinders good social science research.

Formal research ethics codes perpetuate imbalances between ethics regulators and researchers in the social sciences. Some of these imbalances are an outcome of ethics regimes that use the biomedical paradigm when evaluating social science research. The bureaucratic nature in the manner by which ethics committees operate is yet another factor that produces imbalances that reshape social scientific enquiry. This chapter, however, underscores some of the less recognised ways that ethics codes produce a disequilibrium. First, ethics codes require, in effect, that researchers in the social sciences ‘other’ themselves at the expenses of their traditional stock of social scientific methodology by seeing themselves through the eyes of the colonising ethics codes. Second, ethics codes insist that researchers need to exemplify a far larger number of virtues than the very few set aside for members of ethics review committees. Ethics regimes place social scientists on the margins of the ethics world: the regime not only colonises them, but also insists that they hold on to virtues that are quite absent with respect to members of ethics committees.

The online database of the second edition of the OED, combined with tools developed at the University of Waterloo, gives researchers a unique opportunity to explore the dictionary in depth and in ways that would either be impossible or too time consuming to contemplate by manual means. However, the OED database is an unusually complex reference text. It makes use of many technical terms and abbreviations, and employs numerous structural and typographical conventions to alert users to elements within entries. The author discusses the history and structure of the OED database as well as tools developed to manipulate the database. Four sample searches are discussed in an appendix to the article.