Question: Anne is a second year Business Studies student at her local University. As part of a Marketing module she is required to undertake a piece of market research. She has chosen to investigate the buying of designerlabelled fashion clothing by people in their early teens. To do this she has created a questionnaire to be used in a street survey. This consists of a series of short questions which gather some basic information about the respondents (e.g. gender, age and postcode) and then some information on what adverts they have seen, what clothes stores they use and what labels they would buy.
Unfortunately she has had little helpful response when using this information in the street and therefore has decided to use it with members of her extended family. A total of 23 intelligible responses have been received and she has now written this up as a report. To check she was going about this in the right way, she shared this information with a group of friends who made a number of helpful suggestions on presentation. The report has now been submitted as coursework. Do you think there were any ethical issues with the actions Anne took in completing this assessed work? In what practical ways might this work have been carried out to avoid ethical problems?