Name: ______Date: ______
Psychology: Ethics of Human Research
Directions: You will apply the principles and norms of testing on humans to several situations below.
After reading each research plan, discuss the ethical considerations of each.
A). You plan to study the effects of competition on ability to solve math problems. Half of the subjects will be told that you want to see what approach they take in solving math problems. The other half will be told that you want to see which person chooses the best approach.
B). You plan to compare the intellectual skills of retired people with those of sophomores. To recruit sophomores, you plan to arrange for volunteers to receive an A in their psychology class and for nonvolunteers to have their grade lowered. To recruit retired people, you plan to go to a retirement community meeting each evening next week, knock at people’s doors, and ask them to work some puzzles without explaining all of the details of the study because most would not understand.
C). You plan to compare marijuana use in college freshmen and seniors. Because you may want to re-interview some subjects later, you plan to write their names and phone numbers of the data sheets. You plan to promise confidentiality so that subjects will trust you and to keep the data in your room in a locked file.
D). You plan to study the effects of an educational (cable) TV curriculum on learning to read. You give access to the cable TV programs to 100 homes with 5-year-olds whose parents want their child to watch the TV curriculum daily. You get permission to test those 100 children in 2 months, along with 100 matched control children who will not have access to the cable TV.
E). To study self-esteem in children, you plan to have 8-year-olds draw pictures of themselves and their friends and to answer some questions, and provide their response without their names of other unique identifiers. You plan to ask a teacher friend of yours to let you test some of her students.
F). To study how college students respond to the death of a parent, you plan to survey students in several classes to learn who has lost a parent in the last 10 years. You plan to recruit these students and interview them about what happened to their parent and how they coped with the death.