The Ethical Framework of Advertising and Marketing Research Practitioners: A Moral Development Perspective

The purpose of this study is to explore the level of moral reasoning characterized by members of the research chain. The study used a moral development scale developed from moral cognition research (Kohlberg 1969) to investigate the moral reasoning process used by marketing/advertising researchers. Findings from this study of 185 researchers indicate that marketing/advertising researchers reason at least at the same levels of moral development as does the general population. Further, there is very little difference in the moral reasoning skills between groups in the research chain. One implication of these findings is that a uniform code of marketing ethics might be a useful way to address perceptions of research misconduct.