In a short essay, discuss the ethical issues related to data preparation and analysis

What will be an ideal response?

Ethical issues can arise during the data preparation and analysis step, particularly in areas where the researcher has to exercise judgment. While checking, editing, coding, transcribing, and cleaning, the researcher can get some idea about the quality of the data. Sometimes it is easy to identify respondents who did not take the questionnaire seriously or who otherwise provided data of questionable quality. Consider, for example, a respondent who checks the "neither agree nor disagree" response to all the 30 items measuring attitude toward spectator sports. Decisions about whether such respondents should be discarded, that is, not included in the analysis, can raise ethical concerns. A good rule of thumb is to make such decisions during the data preparation phase before conducting any analysis. Discarding respondents after analyzing the data raises ethical concerns, particularly if this information is not fully disclosed in the written report. Moreover, the procedure used to identify unsatisfactory respondents and the number of respondents discarded should be clearly disclosed.