Cloak-and-dagger organization research: Benefits, costs & ethics of covert participant observation
Roulet TJ., Gill MJ., Stenger S.
Covert participant observation has often been discarded as a research method in the social sciences on the grounds that deceiving research subjects is unethical. We review the benefits and costs of the method to argue that the ethicality of covert observation is more ambiguous. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the study of socially important topics is often only possible through substantially covert participant observation.