What are the three ethical principles of the Belmont Report and how are they applied?
- Respect for persons - process of informed consent and protection of special groups in research like children or prisoners
- Beneficence - the evaluation of risks and benefits to participants in the study and to society as a whole
- Justice - the way participants are selected for research > one group should not bear the burden for research and participants should be representative of the group that benefits from the research.
What are the similarities/differences between the Belmont Report’s principles and the five APA Ethical Principles?
The APA Ethical principles are not just for research, but also for teachers and professionals in psychology. They include 2 more principles: fidelity and responsibility (establishing trust, accepting responsibility for professional behaviour) and the principle of integrity (striving to be accurate, truthful and honest in one’s work).
What are the procedure that are in place to protect human and animal subjects in research?
The APA’s ethical standard 8 provides enforcable guidelines such as informed consent, institutional review boards, deception, debriefing, research misconduct and animal research.
What are some of the ways that ethical decision making requires balancing priorities?
- Risk vs. Benefits - does the research benefit society, and is it worth the harm it may cause?
- Rights of individual participants vs. societal gains - is deceiving them in a situation okay and when does it become too much?
- Free participation vs. coercion - although participants may want to be compensated, when is the monetary reward too small or too great?
What are some historical examples of unethical research?
- The Tuskegee Syphilis Study - harming people, not asking for consent and targeting a particular group in research
- The Milgram obedience studies - grey areas in ethical research, such as how researchers define harm to patients and balancing risk-reward.
What is data fabrication and flasification?
Fabrication - researchers inventing data to fit their hypotheses
Falsification - researchers influencing a study’s results
What are the three principles of ethical animal research?
- Replacement - alternatives to animals should be found first
- Refinement - researchers must modify experimental procedure to minimise animal distress
- Reduction - researchers should adopt experimental designs and procedures with as few animal subjects as possible
