Research Ethics and Human Participants Policy
The International Journal of Social Exploration (IJSoE) is committed to the ethical conduct and responsible reporting of research involving human participants, communities, personal information, and other ethically sensitive materials.
Ethical Responsibility
Authors are responsible for ensuring that their research has been conducted in accordance with applicable ethical principles, institutional requirements, professional standards, and relevant laws or regulations.
Where formal ethics approval is required, authors should obtain approval from an appropriate institutional or independent ethics committee before commencing the relevant research and should provide sufficient information regarding such approval in the manuscript where appropriate.
Informed Consent
Where applicable, researchers should obtain informed and voluntary consent from participants before collecting or using research data.
Consent procedures should be appropriate to the nature of the research, characteristics of the participants, level of risk, and applicable institutional or legal requirements.
Where written consent is not reasonably appropriate, authors should be able to explain the alternative ethical procedure used.
Privacy, Confidentiality and Anonymity
Authors must take reasonable steps to protect participants' privacy, confidentiality, and personal information.
Identifiable or sensitive information should not be published unless its disclosure is ethically and legally justified and appropriate permission or consent has been obtained where required.
Anonymization or pseudonymization should be used where appropriate, while recognizing that complete anonymity may not always be possible in certain qualitative, ethnographic, community-based, or small-population studies.
Vulnerable or Sensitive Populations
Additional care should be taken in research involving children, older persons, persons with reduced decision-making capacity, marginalized or vulnerable communities, persons in dependent relationships, or participants exposed to potential social, economic, legal, psychological, or reputational harm.
Authors should describe relevant safeguards where necessary for appropriate editorial assessment.
Qualitative and Community-Based Research
IJSoE recognizes that ethical practice in Sociology and Social Work may vary according to research design, field setting, cultural context, and institutional environment.
Ethnographic, qualitative, participatory, community-based, and field research may involve ethical considerations that cannot always be represented solely through formal approval documentation.
Authors should therefore provide sufficient information to demonstrate how participant welfare, consent, confidentiality, researcher responsibility, and contextual ethical issues were addressed.
Research Where Formal Ethical Approval Was Not Required
In some jurisdictions, institutions, or forms of social research, formal ethics committee approval may not be legally or institutionally required.
The absence of formal approval will not automatically make a manuscript ineligible for consideration. However, authors should clearly explain why formal approval was not required and describe the ethical safeguards followed.
The Editorial Team may request clarification or supporting documentation where reasonably necessary.
Use of Secondary and Publicly Available Data
Research based on secondary datasets, archival sources, publicly available information, documents, or other existing materials should comply with applicable terms of access, privacy expectations, data-use conditions, copyright requirements, and relevant ethical principles.
The fact that information is accessible online does not necessarily remove all ethical obligations regarding privacy, vulnerability, or potential harm.
Sensitive Personal and Health Information
Where research involves health information, personal histories, trauma, social stigma, discrimination, family matters, or other sensitive topics, authors should take particular care to minimize unnecessary identification and potential harm.
Ethical Concerns Raised During Editorial Review
The Editorial Team may request information relating to ethics approval, consent procedures, participant safeguards, data handling, or related matters where such information is reasonably necessary to assess the ethical integrity of a submission.
Where serious concerns arise, the journal may pause editorial consideration, request clarification, seek appropriate expert advice, reject the manuscript, or refer the matter to an appropriate institution or authority where warranted.
The journal does not normally conduct formal institutional or legal investigations itself.
Reporting of Ethics Information
Where relevant, authors should include an appropriate ethics statement in the manuscript indicating the nature of ethical approval, consent, or other safeguards used.
Authors are responsible for the accuracy of any ethics-related statements and documentation supplied to the journal.
Editorial Assessment
Ethical issues will be considered in context, taking into account the nature of the research, participant population, methodology, institutional environment, applicable requirements, and available evidence.
Compliance with this policy does not replace an author's responsibility to comply with applicable institutional, professional, ethical, and legal obligations.
