Education Research Frontier September 2013, Volume 3, Issue 3, PP.92-95
The Roles and Responsibilities of the Educational Researcher Shiyun Wang1 , Pengju Zhu 2 1. Continuing Education College, College of Journalism and Communication, Hebei University, Baoding, 071000, P.R.China 2. College of Education, Hebei University, Baoding, 071000, P.R.China Email: 11786797@qq.com
Abstract In the paper, the focus is on the roles and responsibilities of the educational researcher examined through experiment. As researcher, the roles and responsibilities are very important issues to the successful research. The suitable roles help the researcher to get the valid and the exact data from the investigation. The moral and ethical responsibilities help the researcher to avoid harm others, invade privacy and offend other people during the research. In this paper, the definition of research will be introduced at first. Then the roles and responsibilities of the educational researcher will be discussed respectively. By means of literature review. Numerous literatures and research achievements will be introduced. Keywords: The Roles; the Responsibilities; Educational Researcher
1 INTRODUCTION Research is a good method to accelerate the development of a topic, as it can help researchers get useful information as well as give opportunity to improve their research area. Burns commented that “Research is a systematic investigation to find answers to a problem”. [1] This point has been supported by Henrichsen,Smith and Baker, who indicated that “research is an organized and systematic way of finding answers to questions”. [2] The productions of the research give the new knowledge and direction on how to deal with the community problems to the whole society. Similarly, Wilkinson said that research provides “new and intrinsically valuable knowledge or better methods to deal with disease, or more reliable information about how to correct some social problem”. [3] Researchers need to consider the two aspects when conducting research. Firstly, they should play appropriate roles to get the valid and the reliable data through a series of investigations. Secondly, they should assume responsibility to think about the ethical and moral issues during the research. Along with the development of the social science, the ethical problems have attracted much attention from researchers. Likewise, Wilkinson commented that “research can be a burden, principally to the subjects. It can physically harm them, or invade their privacy, or offend them, and so on”. [3] So researchers need to think about the moral and ethical issues when they conduct their research. In the article, the roles and the responsibilities of the educational researcher will be analysed. First of all is the roles of researcher, then followed by some ethical issues. The ethical problems existing in the each stage of the research involve two important aspects of ethical problem that should be discussed----informed consent and privacy. The purpose of the essay is to deepen understanding about the roles and responsibilities of the educational researcher.
2 THE ROLES OF THE RESEARCHER As leaders of research, researchers need to possess many abilities, including experience, fairness, knowledge, and honesty which are the most important abilities for researchers. At the same time, the ethical factors of the roles of researcher also are decisive factors to the research. The three ethical aspects concern the roles of researcher“scientific responsibility, relation to the subjects, and researcher independence”. [4] The “scientific responsibility” means that researchers must have sufficient knowledge about the research and their profession. With respect to the “relation to the subjects”, researchers should be good at playing different roles including exploiter, reformer, - 92 www.erfrontier.org