Ethical challenges in research on sexual dysfunction

Abstract

Despite more than a century of research on sexual dysfunction, there has been limited attention to ethical concerns. This is problematic because sex research involves complex ethical questions that generate confusion for ethics review and have not been addressed by ethical guidelines. We analyze two questions. First, does sexual content raise the risk profile of a research protocol? We argue that there is nothing inherent in sexual content that makes a study high risk and that many sexual dysfunction studies involve no more than minimal risk. Second, we ask whether research interventions that involve seeing participants undressed or having physical contact with a research subject are permissible? We argue that these interventions raise an important ethical challenge—they often involve sexual dysfunction researchers engaging in interventions that would not be conducted in their standard practice. To resolve this, we propose an expertise-based account of the permissibility of sexual dysfunction research.