Ethical attitudes towards marketing research practices: A cross-cultural study

Every department within an organization should consider the ethical issues related to its functions. Marketing departments, in general, and marketing research activities, in particular, are not an exception in this regard. Marketing research ethics is one of the most ignored and superficially studied areas of the discipline. The purpose of this cross-cultural study is a comparative examination of ethical attitudes of business students toward marketing research practices. Two groups of business students completed a self-administered questionnaire of 17 scenarios related to marketing research ethics, 151 students from Turkey and 149 students from the United States. The discussion includes implications of the results for marketing research ethics in terms of distinguishing differences and similarities between the two countries.