8.1 Empirical versus ethical questions

When it comes to research questions, social workers are best equipped to answer empirical questions (those that can be answered by real experience in the real world) as opposed to ethical questions (those that people have moral opinions about, that may not be answerable in reference to the real world). While social workers have explicit ethical obligations, like social justice, research projects ask empirical questions that help support those ethical principles.

For example, I had a student group who wanted to research the penalties for sexual assault. Their original research question was: “How can prison sentences for sexual assault be so much lower than the penalty for drug possession?” Outside of the research context, that is a darn good question! It speaks to how the War on Drugs and the patriarchy have distorted the criminal justice system towards policing of drug crimes over violent crimes. Unfortunately, it is an ethical question, not an empirical one. How could you answer that question by gathering data about people in the real world? What would an answer to that question even look like?

As the students worked on the project through the semester, they continued to focus on the topic of sexual assault in the criminal justice system. Their research question became more empirical because they read more empirical articles about their topic. At one point, they considered evaluating intervention programs for perpetrators of sexual assault to see if they reduced the likelihood of recidivism. They also considered analyzing whether the sexual assault recidivism rate was lower in counties and states that imposed longer-than-average jail sentences for the crime. These projects not only addressed the ethical question of punishing perpetrators of sexual violence, but they also gathered and analyzed real-world information. Our job as social work researchers is to gather social facts about social work issues, not to judge or determine morality.

In order to help you better understand the difference between ethical and empirical questions, let’s consider a topic about which people have moral opinions. How about SpongeBob SquarePants? ^[1] In early 2005, members of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family (2005) ^[2] denounced this seemingly innocuous cartoon character as “morally offensive” because they perceived his character to be one that promotes a “pro-gay agenda.” Focus on the Family supported their claim that SpongeBob is immoral by citing his appearance in a children’s video designed to promote tolerance of all family forms (BBC News, 2005). ^[3] They also cited SpongeBob’s regular hand-holding with his male sidekick Patrick as further evidence of his immorality.

So, should we conclude that SpongeBob SquarePants is immoral based on this information? Not so fast. While parents, newspapers, or television reporters may provide an answer, a social science researcher cannot. Questions of morality are ethical, not empirical. Of course, this doesn’t mean that social work researchers cannot the study opinions or social meanings surrounding SpongeBob SquarePants (Carter, 2010). ^[4] Social work researchers study humans after all, and in the following chapters, you will discover that we are trained to utilize a variety of scientific data-collection techniques to understand patterns of human beliefs and behaviors. Using these techniques, we could find out how many people in the United States find SpongeBob morally reprehensible, but we could never empirically learn whether SpongeBob is in fact morally reprehensible.