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http://bloggenrolla.wordpress.com        Why is reliability important?

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The Helsinki Convention and subsequent declaration took place in June 1964 in Helsinki, Finland and was adopted by the World Medical Association. Since the first printing it has been refined six times, the most recent in 2008, and has been extended from 11 paragraphs to 32. The convention focussed on and produced a selection of ethical principles that apply to the medical community, in particular medical research. The Helsinki convention and the five basic ethical principles were based and a continuation on from the Nuremberg code.

The Nuremberg code was a set of ten principles that were created following the revelation of the war crimes that took place during the Second World War. The guidelines are for the ethical treatment for human participants in research, and the aim was to try and prevent the unethical research that had occurred, for example some of the experiments that occurred in the Nazi concentration camps during the war.

The first of the ten principles that the Nuremberg code decided on was that all human subjects must give voluntary consent before taking part in form of research or experiment. This means that the person who is running the research has the job to make sure that the participant has full knowledge and understanding of all facets of the experiment and all that it entails. They also have the right to refuse if they do not want to take part in the research and should not feel pressured by any outside force, whether it is the experimenter or anyone else. The second guideline is that the research must have a purpose, and the result of the research will be applicable and useful for society and the potential risk should be outweighed by what the research could bring to society. Next was the principle that stated that research should have been performed on animals before being performed on human participants. This is mainly aimed at medical research or pharmaceutical production. One of the principles is that during experiments should be conducted in a way to minimise potential harm to candidates; this is then followed by the principle that says that if there is any risk of death or any permanent injury then the experiment should not take place (of course there are exceptions, as if it is a surgical procedure then there is always the risk of death). Proper preparations should be provided for each experiment, and the experiment should only be performed by a fully qualified professional in that field. Finally the participant has the power to terminate the experiment at any given time if they should wish, and the researcher has to be prepared for that; also if at any point the experiment could become harmful to the participant the researcher should terminate the experiment (Research Methods for the Behavioural Sciences, Gravetter and Forzano).

From these ten guidelines the Helsinki convention produced the five principles that provide the main core for ethics in psychology. The first of these five principles is in all research fully informed consent must be obtained from the participants before any research can begin. Like with the Nuremberg code this means that participants must be fully aware and understand what is going to happen; so what is being researched, how it might affect them, the method etc. This particular principle can often cause dilemmas, because often in psychology if you were to tell the participant what you were measuring it would alter the results or the responses given. For example the research done by Fein and Spencer (1997) into whether prejudice is used by people to maintain their self-image. When they were doing the investigation they couldn’t tell the participants that they were researching how their self-esteem affected how positively they described the photos of people, as it would have affected how they rated them which would have made the results unreliable. Although the deception didn’t cause the participants any harm, they still did not obtain fully informed consent as the participants were not fully aware as to what the experiment entailed. This is also difficult with studies that include children or vulnerable adults. In these cases a loco parentis may be needed to give consent along with or instead of the participant.

The second of the five basic ethical principles is that the participant has the option to withdraw from the experiment at any point they want to. This principle allows the participant to have the freedom to leave if they feel uncomfortable without any repercussions. However it is a bit frustrating for those who are doing the study, as often that participants’ data then cannot be used. This again though has a potential issue, especially when the study is involving children as it is often difficult to judge whether they actually want to withdraw. As rule of thumb it is often considered withdrawal if the child avoids the situation (Ethical principles for conducting research with human participants, found at: dcs.gla.ac.uk/ethics/bps-conduct.pdf). Another of the basic ethical principles states that the participant must be protected from harm throughout the duration of the experiment. Harm includes both mental and physical, and the aim by researchers is for participants to leave the experiment with the same or better frame of mind when compared to the beginning of the study.

At the end of the study the investigator has to debrief the participant, this consists of the investigator filling in any blanks the participant may have over the nature of the research and any misconceptions that may have occurred. The last of the five basic ethical principles is concerned with the participants’ confidentiality. All the information provided by the participant should be kept confidential unless they have given express permission stating otherwise.

The Helsinki Declaration and the five basic ethical principles are all in place to protect participants who may take part in any form of research. Although they are very thorough and can be applied to all different types of psychological research there is research which is not clear cut as to whether it can be considered ethical, for these occasions there are committees whose sole purpose it is to say whether a proposal is ethical or not. This can be a minefield.