Prime incentives,ethical dilemmas: The case of Amazon gift cards and lessons for integrity in social research

Abstract

This research note presents a critical moment during a doctoral research project in which I was faced with the decision of whether to offer Amazon gift cards to participants. Issues of ethics and justice were at the forefront of this research given its focus on teaching critical economics and the broader political context in which it was undertaken. I begin by contextualizing the critical incident within the research study and detailing the ethical dilemma it raised. Next, I outline the ways in which the dominant literature on research design and methods deals with ethical considerations in social research. I argue that most accounts overlook the potentially serious and lasting harm that may affect individuals and contexts beyond those directly implicated in the study, as illustrated by the Amazon gift card dilemma. I suggest that researchers ought to consider the research integrity of a project in which ethical decision-making is an integral part of the research process. I also propose a more collectivist approach to ethical decision-making in the research community, ending with specific recommendations.

Introduction

Drawing from C. Wright Mills (1959), Maxwell (2013) reminds us that making a sharp distinction between research and the rest of our lives is harmful in at least two ways. First, this separation ‘obscures the actual motives, assumptions, and agendas that researchers have, and leads them to ignore the influence of these on their research process and conclusions’, sometimes even leading researchers to hide these when they do not feel they are living up to the goal of scientific neutrality (p. 24). Second, the separation between research and the rest of our lives results in the loss of ‘a major source of insights, questions, and practical guidance’ for researchers in conducting their work (Maxwell, 2013: 24). Maxwell thus recommends that researchers write analytical memos to examine their goals, assumptions, and values as these relate to the research (p. 34). Such an endeavour can lead the researcher to discover the potential resources and concerns that their identity and experiences could produce. I wrote a series of such memos throughout the course of an educational research study on critical economic literacy teaching, both to work out ideas that surfaced through the act of writing and to understand my relationship to the study. Drawing on an analytical memo titled ‘The Gift Card Dilemma’, this research note illustrates a critical moment in which I was confronted with an ethical decision. In the process, I discovered that the literature on qualitative research methods offered little that addressed my particular concerns. In what follows, I describe the events that transpired, my ensuing reflections, and the broader implications for social research.

The study

The project in which the ethical dilemma emerged was a doctoral study on the beliefs, practices, and lives of 10 teachers in Québec and Ontario who teach financial literacy at the intermediate and senior levels (Soroko, 2021). While financial literacy education traditionally tends to revolve around individual decision-making, the participants in my study self-identified as taking a more critical approach that moved beyond lessons on personal finance and individual responsibility. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, various private and public transnational financial and consumer literacy organizations, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), have been advocating to incorporate more financial literacy into school curricula (Arthur, 2011; Pinto, 2012). Teachers’ experiences and perspectives, however, have been left uncaptured in the scholarly and political debates on the efficacy, merits, and politics of financial literacy education. My study sought to include the perspectives of teachers by investigating the degree to which they incorporated mainstream understandings of financial literacy education into their classrooms. I was also curious to explore the ways in which some teachers reframed financial literacy lessons towards more critical and economically just ends by educating students about the structural obstacles to economic prosperity and fairness. The study took place in the midst of what can truly be called a historic moment, during the COVID-19 outbreak and the subsequent financial crash, as well as the Black Lives Matter protests that called for a deep reckoning with institutionalized racism and an unjust social order. Set against the backdrop of escalating economic inequality, environmental disasters resulting from climate change, and rising antidemocratic politics worldwide, issues of ethics and justice were front and centre for both participants and for me – the researcher – during the course of the project.

The critical moment

In the early stages of the research design, I had vacillated on the issue of including an honorarium for participants. When I finally made the decision to do so, it was on the day of the deadline to submit my application to the Research Ethics Board (REB). The previous project on which I had been a graduate research assistant was a large-scale study that had offered teachers Amazon gift cards as an incentive for participating in surveys and interviews. Other projects with which I was familiar, including those dealing with issues of social justice and educational opportunity, also offered vouchers to the online retailer. The advantages of using Amazon in research studies with thousands of survey participants are apparent. These gift cards are easy to purchase and distribute, and participants can use them to buy a wide range of products online at ‘the everything store’. I was thus inclined to follow suit. While finalizing my recruitment poster and REB application, however, I found myself hesitating. Was it hypocritical to offer participants a gift card to a corporation notorious for its poor treatment of workers in a study exploring the teaching of economic justice? Would my participants, who were likely to teach about issues such as the unequal distribution of wealth and the ethical implications of consumerism, find this incentive unprincipled? As I was rushing to make the REB deadline, I decided to proceed with what seemed to be a routine practice in other educational research projects. No sooner had I submitted the application than I felt a pang of regret. For the next six weeks while the submission was under review, my conflicting feelings about this decision would often resurface.

I felt uneasy associating my project with Amazon. The corporate giant's name on the recruitment poster and other materials intended for my participants felt like a stain on a project of which I was otherwise proud. The company's reputation stood in tension with the broader aims of the research, which sought to spotlight critical financial literacy education. Such teaching often entails attention to issues of economic justice that do not align with Amazon's brutal labour practices and corporate culture. In recent years, the online retailer has attracted public criticism for its dehumanizing treatment of workers, lack of social responsibility, harmful impact on the environment, aggressive tax evasion, and union-busting, among other wrongdoings (see, for example, Fair Tax Mark, 2019; McClelland, 2012; Nguyen, 2018; Silver-Greenberg and Kitroeff, 2018). I should have anticipated that the teachers I was recruiting – those likely to care about labour and human rights – would have similar qualms.

The participants I recruited for my study did, in fact, report teaching about unjust corporate practices, including sweatshops and unsafe working conditions in companies such as Amazon. They also taught about the ways in which the dominance of these market behemoths squeezes out local and independent businesses. A marketing teacher even used Amazon as a case study in a lesson on externalities, teaching students about the social costs, such as pollution, that we all share when Amazon products are shipped and delivered using public infrastructure. It was before any research transpired, however, that my misgivings about offering Amazon gift cards were confirmed. Before agreeing to participate in the research, one of the first teachers to come forward asked whether the $40 Amazon gift card could be donated to a charitable organization instead. Embarrassed, I agreed immediately. At the same time, I was relieved to have my apprehension validated. The encounter gave me the impetus to finally contact my university's research ethics board, as I had been previously considering, and request to change the honorarium from an Amazon gift card to a gift card of each participant's choice, including the option of donating to a charity.

Although it entailed additional effort on my part, I modified the information on the consent letter, poster, email script, and project description in the previously approved ethics application. I resubmitted the application because I believed it was worth doing. I felt disappointed in myself for not having acted according to my principles in the initial submission, and the experience exposed how easy it is to reproduce problematic practices in research. Funding and publication pressures make researchers, especially novice and early career scholars who are in precarious positions, susceptible to rash decisions in the name of expediency, efficiency, and output amidst the audit culture of the neoliberal academy (Muzzatti, 2022; Shore and Wright, 2015; Sparkes, 2021). At the same time, the experience compelled me to be more attentive to ethical issues that arose at other stages of the project.

Ethical considerations in social research

Procedural ethics refer to ‘ethical actions dictated as universally necessary by larger organizations, institutions or governing bodies’, such as institutional review boards (Tracy, 2010: 847). In Canada, for example, institutions establish Research Ethics Boards (REBs), which review applications in accordance with the considerations set out in the Tri-Council Policy. The Policy outlines three core principles that ought to underlie the conduct of research: respect for persons, concern for welfare, and justice (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2022). To assure that research is conducted in accordance with those principles, the policy provides guidelines around assessing risks and potential benefits to both participants and researchers, informed and on-going consent, issues of inclusion and exclusion, and the duty to protect participants’ privacy and confidentiality. Regarding incentives, as I discovered when I was making decisions around the Amazon gift cards, the policy states that these should not be ‘so large or attractive as to encourage reckless disregard of risks’ (p. 34). The Tri-Council Policy, however, ultimately places the onus on researchers to decide the particular model and level of incentives appropriate to their study. In this and other domains, guidelines are open to interpretation, and researchers must, understandably, exercise professional judgement to determine the best course of action when faced with the myriad decisions and dilemmas that arise during a research study.

Some scholars (see, for example, Neves et al., 2018; Tolich and Fitzgerald, 2006) have thus argued that an unsurmountable gap exists between what regulatory regimes can anticipate and the ethical decision-making that takes place in the field. Furthermore, ethics appears to be less about ethical frameworks and more about risk management and control, particularly in light of potential law suits and reputational damage within the audit culture that dominates higher education (Berg et al., 2016; Neves et al., 2018).

To navigate ethical terrains, researchers can also turn to qualitative research scholarship, some of which outlines considerations similar to those laid out by the Tri-Council Policy described above (harm and risk, privacy and anonymity, informed consent, etc.). Other ethical questions that qualitative researchers have foregrounded include the researcher's competence to conduct the study, the quality and rigour of the research, the power dynamics in researcher-participant relationships, the impact of the research on both participants’ and researchers’ mental health, as well as bias in design, analysis, and dissemination of the study's results (Cyr and Goodman, 2024; Maxwell, 2013; Merriam and Tisdell, 2016; Miles et al., 2014; Patton, 2015). Interpretative and qualitative researchers have also begun to expand understandings of what constitutes ethical research to include various shifts in social research, including a move toward community-building and communitarian ethics, a reassessment of self-other relations, and the politics of representation (Lincoln, 2009). Scholars have also critically reflected on how data are handled, how reports are written, as well as who writes them, especially in the context of persons of colour, non-Western peoples, Indigenous cultures, and historically marginalized groups (Lincoln, 2009).

A more collectivist understanding of ethics

Despite some of the changes in ethical frameworks articulated by Lincoln (2009), four kinds of ethics outlined by Tracy (2010) are dominant in the literature. In addition to procedural ethics discussed earlier, situational and culturally specific ethics emerge from a ‘reasoned consideration of a context's specific circumstances’ (Tracy, 2010: 847). Relational ethics ‘involve an ethical self-consciousness in which researchers are mindful of their character, actions, and consequences on others’, while exiting ethics ‘continue beyond the data collection phase to how researchers leave the scene and share the results’ (p. 847). Merriam and Tisdell (2016) note that relational and situational ethical dilemmas depend not only on preestablished codes of ethics but a researcher's own values and responsiveness to contextual factors that arise in the moment. Missing in the literature, however, are discussions about how to make ethical decisions that take into account potentially serious and lasting harm that may affect individuals and contexts beyond those directly implicated in the study. Specifically, there is a lack of attention to concerns about supporting wider unethical social behaviours and structures through research practices.

As the gift card scenario illustrates, current discussions on research ethics do not capture my particular dilemma. Offering Amazon gift cards did not pose any real harm to me or my research participants. Yet, by purchasing its gift cards, was I not complicit in endorsing Amazon's dehumanizing and ecologically harmful business practices? Absent in the various texts I consulted for guidance in resolving the various ethical dilemmas in my research was the idea that our projects carry implications for the world beyond the confines of the research study. As researchers and individuals, we are, as Shotwell (2016) suggests, ‘ethically entangled with more distant others’, meaning that ‘we have responsibilities by virtue of our relationships with near and distant others’ (p. 107). Donald (2012) similarly proposes an ecological understanding of human relationality in which ‘humans are seen as intimately enmeshed in webs of relationships with each other and with the other entities that inhabit the world’ (p. 103). While it is beyond the scope of this study to review all available literature on the topic of ethics in social research, the textbooks and guidelines recommended and accessible to me as a doctoral student neglected this wider perspective on ethics.

Ethical considerations as an integral component of a research study

The qualitative research texts featured in the introductory research methods courses in my doctoral programme, which I used to inform the design of my PhD study, all emphasized the importance of what Cyr and Goodman (2024) refer to as ‘alignment’: when one's methodological choices line up with the final goals of the research project (p. 5). Tracy (2010) calls this ‘meaningful coherence’, describing research that achieves what it purports to be about, uses methods and procedures that fit its stated goals, and meaningfully interconnects literature, research questions, findings, and interpretations with one another. While Maxwell (2013) argues that ethical concerns are an integral aspect of research, standard frameworks do not capture the ways in which ethical decision-making ought to thread through the various parts of the research and align with the project's aims. The case of the Amazon gift card made it clear to me that in offering incentives from a company known for its harmful conduct, I was acting in opposition not only to my own values and principles but also to those underpinning the project. In my case, the worldview guiding my study reflected a more just approach to teaching about finances by shifting the blame away from the individual to the larger systems and structures that not only hinder certain individuals from flourishing but are outright exploitative. Amazon gift cards simply did not belong here.

The critical incident with the Amazon incentive led me to consider whether the values embodying the research project as well as the ethical decisions we make as researchers should work in concert with other parts of the research study, including the conceptual and theoretical frameworks, data collection and analysis, and publication and other dissemination venues. If a project explores and promotes the values of social and economic justice in its conceptual framing, ought not this same set of values guide the decisions in research design and conduct? Consider the following questions. How can scholars committed to labour rights and social justice justify outsourcing transcription services to companies such as Rev.com, known for exploiting their workers (see, e.g., Deahl, 2019; Menegus, 2019)? What if our research concerns the detrimental effects of climate change? Is it defensible to fly to conferences to share our findings given the environmental impact of aircraft emissions? And if we study the threat of misinformation to democracy, how should we think about our engagement with platforms such as X that often perpetuate these very issues? All of these questions, as was the case with my Amazon dilemma, touch on issues that affect fellow human beings and the environment beyond the immediate scope of the research.

Research integrity and a more collectivist approach to ethical questions

Some teachers in my study did choose an Amazon gift card over other options, including those most critical of capitalism and those who expressed concern about economic justice and the public good. The intent of this article is not to pass moral judgements on researchers who offer Amazon gift cards or participants who accept them. Teachers give up valuable time to participate in research, despite increased workload, work intensification, and time poverty (Creagh et al., 2025), and their salaries vary significantly, depending on their geographic location. It is not difficult to understand why an Amazon gift card is an appealing incentive. Despite its notoriety, Amazon also provides lifesaving convenience for individuals with disabilities or experiencing illness, residents in rural areas, or anyone who is overworked and lacking the time to shop even for necessities (Aronowitz, 2018). Just as with the recent ban on plastic straws, conflicting ethical demands arise. Regulating plastic straws may be good for the environment, but for some people with disabilities, a lack of access to straws can be catastrophic (Danovich and Godoy, 2018).

Ultimately, Amazon is ubiquitous, and as much as I try to resist purchasing from the corporate giant, I have found it impossible to avoid entirely. Even in the context of the research project in question, my brush with Amazon did not end with the gift card. Part of my study involved documenting the kinds of resources that participants use in their critical economic literacy teaching. Many of the films that participants listed, including Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, were only available on major streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime, Google Play, or Apple TV. Calling it a ‘greed flaw’ in capitalism, Moore (2009) contends that his films have been distributed by studios owned by large corporations, despite his work being an affront to everything for which these entities stand, simply because they seek to make money. At the same time, even if corporations believe that ‘people aren't going to leave the couch and go and do something political’, because ‘we've done such a good job of numbing their minds and dumbing them down’, Moore (2009) is ‘convinced of the opposite’. Making ethical choices is indeed a thorny endeavour.

In presenting my dilemma, I also want to be cautious and avoid what Shotwell (2016) refers to as ‘personal purity’ politics. ‘There is no food we can eat, clothing we can buy, or energy we can use without deepening our ties to complex webs of suffering’ (p. 4). Shotwell (2016) instead argues that we ought to ‘reach toward a nonindividualized ethical practice that can address the problem of unresolvable ethical entanglement (p. 108) since ‘personal purity is simultaneously inadequate, impossible, and politically dangerous for shared projects of living on earth’ (p. 107). Shotwell (2016) observes that often, discussions of ethics appeal to the global quandaries we face collectively­ – environmental damage as a result of meat eating, for instance. But moral choices about food, such as choosing vegetarianism, are left up to individuals. It is for this reason that I decided to publish this research note, believing it would be valuable for the research community to collectively wrestle with the kinds of ethical questions I have presented.

A more collectivist approach to research would ensure that the pursuit of the well-being of our fellow human beings and planet is not solely left up to individual researchers. Professional associations, for example, would do well to provide guidelines or at least model possibilities for more ethical choices. In the case of incentives, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) – which often releases public statements on major issues of society-wide concern – currently offers its members Amazon and Starbucks gift cards for renewing membership (American Educational Research Association, n.d.). Yet, both of these corporations have come under fire for nefarious business and labour practices. Institutional review boards, who play a vital role in assessing and monitoring the ethical conduct of research, could play an important part in flagging ethical concerns for researchers of the type I have outlined in this article. As Lincoln (2009) astutely observes, it is of course impossible for any one researcher to pursue all ethical domains at once. Yet, if ‘even one shameful ethical contretemps is sidestepped, one painful ethical fieldwork misadventure avoided, it would have been worth considering’ (Lincoln, 2009: 17).

Finally, while I propose a more collectivist approach to thinking through ethical dilemmas, it is important to recognize that, as researchers, we also carry individual responsibility to make principled decisions in the studies we conduct. My Amazon dilemma illustrates the need to expand frameworks for ethical decision-making in social research. The prevailing literature on research design and methods remains too limited when it comes to the role of ethics. To broaden understandings of what constitutes ethical research, I suggest that we strongly consider a research study's integrity – in both senses of the word. First, we ought to think about integrity in terms of the project's quality of being sound, or complete, in the way that all dimensions, including the ethical one, have been considered and integrated. Second, integrity might also reflect a project upholding, or at least engaging seriously with, the moral principles and ethical values at stake. Scholars who author textbooks and articles on research design and methods would do well to elaborate on these dual notions of integrity and incorporate them into methodological frameworks. For those of us conducting the studies, reflective practices such as writing analytical memos, as I have shown, can significantly enrich our work. Indeed, thinking deeply and reasoning with others about the various ethical issues at play in our research would strengthen not only individual research projects but also the research community as a whole.

It takes great effort to avoid succumbing to corporate giants like Amazon. While it may seem like there are more pressing ethical concerns to worry about both in research and beyond, if we abandon questioning the quotidian and ordinary choices we make, our attempts at more equitable and socially just research risk becoming at best symbolic and at worst ‘intellectually dishonest and politically disingenuous’ (Muzzatti, 2022: 505). If we are serious about conducting justice-oriented research for the common good, we have a responsibility to think through, both alone and with others, the ethical impacts of even seemingly small research decisions.