The past decade witnessed research stakeholders’ increasing awareness of and concern for ethical standards in human-participant research. This is manifested by the growing number of ethics review boards, funding institutions requiring ethics clearance for research proposals, and professional organizations establishing/adopting their own code of ethics, to name a few. The push for ethical research has been largely influenced by the global activism for human rights and against the exploitation of vulnerable groups. It is also a backlash against flagrant privacy infringements in Internet-based platforms and social media, which have resulted in tougher privacy rules and regulations, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation and at the local level, the Philippine Data Privacy Act.

Whether these developments have steered social science researchers and research organizations to view their research endeavors with an ethics lens and behave more ethically, have yet to be established. This proposed study aims to fill the knowledge gap on what Filipino research organizations and researchers think about ethics and how much they bring to bear ethical principles or standards in their research projects. It aims to answer the principal question: How entrenched or embedded are ethical standards in human-participant research among social science research organizations and researchers in the Philippines?