Cloak-and-dagger Organization Research: Benefits, Costs & Ethics of Covert Participant Observation

Covert participant observation has often been discarded as a research method in the social sciences on the grounds that deceiving research subjects is unethical. This article reviews the benefits and costs of the method to argue that the ethicality of covert observation is more ambiguous. It posits that all observational studies sit along a continuum of consent, with few research projects being either fully overt or fully covert. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that the study of socially important topics such as deviance, misconduct or the treatment of minorities is often only possible through substantially covert participant observation.