Corporació Catalana de Mitjans Audiovisuals

This article describes the ethical issues involved in a research project undertaken by Universitat Pompeu Fabra with the participation of the Corporació Catalana de Mitjans Audiovisuals (Catalan Media Corporation, CCMA). The article analyzes the role played by researchers in professional activities of the CCMA involving information capture and processing. It examines different codes of ethics proposed by a group of Catalan universities and the international scientific community to support this project; and it then focuses on the ethical code applied to different stages of the project where the information being captured and processed is the employees’ own personal data, and to the academic and professional dissemination of the project results. Finally, the article discusses how ethical guidelines are adapted to social science studies, bearing in mind this field’s heavy reliance on ethical codes inherited from the natural sciences. It also presents documents attesting to the approval of the protocols described here by an independent ethics committee.