Introduction: Ethics, Reflexivity and Voice.

This article presents information regarding the March 1, 1996 issue of the journal "Quantitative Sociology." In the spirit of a long standing sociological tradition, the authors question how they have come to understand human behavior and portray it, they question their responsibility to respondents, they question how the self is expressed and situated within the text, and they question how voice may be suppressed by the settings studied. Ethical and moral dilemmas abound in the social research enterprise so much so that they sometimes seem to he taken-for-granted. Personal involvement with the people leads to grapple in isolation, with obligations and responsibilities to people with whom one formed intimate ties. Most concerns revolve around questions of harm, privacy, consent, deception and confidentiality. Rather than submit to formal codes of conduct that would limit the ability to study "messy" complex social realities, one prefers to solve dilemmas situationally, perhaps justifying his choices in the belief that ethical and moral dilemmas are an inescapable, part of the fabric of conducting social research.