You should treat the human subjects in your study as autonomous agents whenever possible. That means they have the right to make their own choices. The easiest way to do that is to provide your survey or interview participants with up-front information about your project and let them choose whether or not they want to participate in it.

You may want to include people in your study who can’t make their own choices. You can include them, but you should do all you can to protect them from harm. 

Which people can’t make their own choices? 

• Prisoners – might not have the right to say no to a project, even if they don’t want to be in it

• Children under 18 – might not have the maturity to know how to choose wisely and depend on their parents and guardians to choose for them

• Seriously physically or mentally ill people – might not have the ability to make a choice at all. 

For all your participants – those who can make their own choices and those who can’t – protection from harm is critically important. You should always build your study with as little risk as you can, but you should always remember that you can’t eliminate all risks.

You should not only protect your human research participants from harm, but you should also make an active effort to secure their well-being.

• The easiest way to do that is to spend some time thinking about the risks your research would pose to the people who participate in it, and then design your study so that those people face as little risk as possible. 

Remember, every research project that involves human participants includes a risk of harming them – the more you can minimize that risk, the less you can harm them.

You, the researcher, should always be as fair as you can to the people you choose to include in your study.

• This means you should never manipulate or force people into participating in your project.