A note on ethical and legal considerations in Housing Studies research methods practices

A note on ethical and legal considerations in Housing Studies research methods practices

 

In the context of doing a Housing Studies dissertation project, please provide 3 examples of legal considerations in research method practices and 3 examples of research ethics consideration in research method practices. Offer 2 examples that could be illegal but ethical and 2 examples that can be legal but not ethical in research method practices. My concern is that legal and ethical concerns are not always the same in research methods practices.

You are right: legality and research ethics overlap but are not identical. Law sets enforceable minimum requirements; ethics asks whether the method is fair, respectful, transparent, and protective of participants—even where the law permits it. Research guidance explicitly notes that an action can be legal but unethical, or illegal but ethical.

Legal considerations

These are issues where a Housing Studies dissertation could breach statutory duties, contractual terms, intellectual-property rights, or institutional rules.

1.    Personal-data protection and secure storage. If you collect tenants’ names, addresses, rent arrears, immigration status, or interview recordings, you must process personal data lawfully, keep it secure, limit access, and retain it only as necessary. Data-protection guidance requires a lawful basis for processing, clear information about use of data, and secure handling. 

2.    Informed consent as a legal/data-protection requirement. For interviews, surveys, or focus groups, participants should receive a participant information sheet and privacy notice, and give clear affirmative consent to participate and to any recording, storage, sharing, or archiving of their data.

3.    Copyright, platform terms, and third-party data. If you scrape property listings, copy planning documents, use photographs, or analyse social-media posts, you must respect copyright and the platform’s terms of use; researchers using social media are expected to follow data producers’ regulations where consistent with legal and ethical requirements.

Ethical considerations

These concern the moral quality of the research relationship and the potential harm to participants, even if no statute is directly breached.

1.    Voluntary participation and the right to withdraw. Participants must be free to refuse or withdraw without penalty, and should be told at what point their data can no longer be removed—for example, after anonymisation and aggregation.

2.    Avoiding coercion and undue influence. A housing researcher should not pressure vulnerable tenants, front-line staff, or community members to participate—for example, by implying that cooperation could affect a landlord’s future treatment of them. Ethical consent must be freely given, informed, and without coercion.

3.    Minimising harm and protecting privacy. Discussing eviction, overcrowding, domestic violence, debt, or immigration insecurity can expose participants to stigma, retaliation, or emotional distress. Ethics review should assess risks, confidentiality limits, anonymisation, and whether disclosure of identity is genuinely necessary.

Illegal but ethical

These cases can be ethically defensible in principle, but may still require legal advice, permission, or an alternative lawful method.

1.    Recording a public meeting without consent to document housing-injustice testimony. If a resident gives powerful evidence about unsafe conditions or displacement, recording may be ethically justified to preserve their account—but it may breach consent, privacy, or recording rules depending on jurisdiction and setting. The ethical issue is the public interest and absence of harm; the legal issue is consent and applicable privacy law.

2.    Using a leaked internal landlord or government document that reveals systematic unsafe housing practices. Publishing the public-interest finding may be ethically defensible, especially if identities are protected and the document exposes serious wrongdoing. However, possessing or reproducing confidential material without authorisation can be legally problematic. A safer dissertation approach is to seek permission, use lawfully disclosed material, or cite publicly available records.

Legal but not ethical

These methods may comply with the letter of the law yet still fail ethical standards.

1.    Using lawfully purchased tenant-complaint data without telling participants it will be used in your dissertation. The data may have been acquired through a permitted route, but participants were not informed of the research purpose, possible re-identification risks, or their right to object. Ethical research requires transparent purposes and meaningful consent or strong safeguards.

2.    Publishing direct quotes from named tenants who legally signed a broad consent form. Even if the consent form was legally valid, quoting identifying details about rent arrears, family conflict, or immigration status could cause reputational or safety harm. Legal compliance does not remove the researcher’s duty to minimise harm and protect dignity.

Practical rule for your dissertation

Before selecting a method, ask two separate questions:

• Is it lawful? Data protection, copyright, confidentiality, recording rules, platform terms, and institutional approvals.
• Is it ethical? Voluntariness, informed consent, privacy, anonymity, risk of harm, fairness, and whether participants would reasonably expect this use of their information.

For a Housing Studies project, the strongest design is usually: obtain university ethics approval, use a clear participant information sheet and consent form, anonymise data, store recordings securely, avoid identifiable details, and explain any limits to confidentiality before data collection begins.