Jim Clark wrote:
This lawyer has more sense than many psychologists who tolerate rather
than fight ridiculous ethics practices. It is silly to think that when
a student wants to ask a few questions of a professor (or of any adult
for that fact), even if it is research, the professor (adult) somehow
needs protecting by an IRB.
Ouch! Less sense the lawyers??
I think what the lawyer has a better "sense" of are the acutal likely
legal ramifications of a particular course of action (that is, after
all, their job). The problem is not that psychologists don't have any
sense (at least not that alone). It is rather than the current ethics
regimes under which we work are all too often senseless (their
frameworks having been developed for people who CUT INTO other people,
rather than for people who more typically present a list of words on a
computer screen to other people), and that the outcomes of a number of
high-profile legal cases seem (at least from the distance we usually
see them) quite bizarre and counterintuitive. So psychologists are,
quite understandably, *afraid* that entirely innocent and reasonable
actions might turn out to violate some arcane, poorly formulated
"ethical" rule that is, in turn, going to be upheld by an eccentric and
incomprehensible court (or, more likely, that they are going to be
punished by a college administration that is much more interested in
avoiding legal entanglements than in defending even reasonable faculty).
Take care
Jim
Take care indeed.
Chris
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
Canada
416-736-5115 ex. 66164
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.yorku.ca/christo
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