The Helsinki Convention and the 5 basic ethical principles
Posted on: November 23, 2011
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.
4 Responses to "The Helsinki Convention and the 5 basic ethical principles"
December 9, 2011 at 7:37 pm
Great amount of information given in your blog but no real argument is presented. In your fourth paragraph it seems you criticise the ethics behind Fein and Spencer’s study because they did not obtain “true” informed consent from their participants as they were using deception to gain results from their study.
I personally don’t think that informed consent is a necessary process that researchers should go through. Medical studies use placebos as a standard of research and it helps to inform researchers about the effectiveness of a drug, for example SSRI’s (http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/288/6/701.short). Ruling out deception almost completely removes the effect of placebo testing and would make drug trials incredibly dangerous processes.
Secondly, as I have mentioned in my own blog, participants actually enjoy deception (http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/44/5/1075/) so how can we as researchers and psychologists claim that obtaining informed consent is more important than obtaining useful research. Surely the ends justify the means in the case of deception?
December 9, 2011 at 11:35 pm
Very interesting blog and you clearly have done your research because you have a alot of information. Maybe abit too much for a blog but you raise some interesting points. I think it is very important that we have principles or rules for people to run experiments by otherwise people can get away with what ever they want. People need a set of rules and regulations advicing them how to behave. This also means that participants are treated in a good way and everyone is treated the same no matter who they are which is very important. Within psychology it is very important that we have a set of ethics to guide people as we are often conducting experiments and particpants need to know that they wont be affected or damaged by the experiment. Good blog though.
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November 25, 2011 at 7:49 pm
Hey, I think you’ve given a lot of great information on the Helsinki convention and the history behind it, however it is a lot to read and I found myself skimming over section. I’d suggest trying to cut it down as much as you could to the basic key points.
I think maybe you could have given examples of studies that have raised ethical questions and what you opinion on them was or how they broke the guidelines.