On Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:58:54 -0600, Jim Clark wrote: > Hi > What are the grounds for thinking that any of this is relevant to the >vast majority of psychological or other social science research?
The vagueness and lack of specificity of the question at first made think that if (a) the writer is not a researcher and/or (b) not doing research in the U.S., then he was unaware of the U.S. federal requirement to abide by the guidelines provided by the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Service and its Office for Human Research Protections. Any institution that receives federal funding, I believe, is required to have an ethics in research course, such as this model course: http://ori.hhs.gov/education/products/montana_round1/research_ethics.html Quoting from the Course Philosophy section: |...All researchers who use human participants in their research are |required to have training on the topic, and research institutions must |have committees to oversee the use of animals and human participation |in research and documentation to show that the oversight is accomplished. | |It is in this context that research institutions are working to develop |research ethics education for investigators, students and lab personnel. |This asynchronous online course provides such education. In anticipation |of expected federal requirements, this online course covers the topics |listed by PHS as core curriculum: | |1). Data acquisition, management, sharing, and ownership; |2). Mentor/trainee responsibilities; |3). Publication practices and responsible authorship; |4). Peer review; |5). Collaborative science; |6). Human subjects; |7). Research involving animals; |8). Research misconduct; and |9). Conflict of interest and commitment./4 | |In addition, the course uses the partially implemented standardized federal |definitions and procedures. | |This course also encourages investigators, and requires students enrolled |in the course for credit, to think critically about what it means to be an |ethical researcher. One may be in compliance, without being an ethical |researcher. Being in compliance means following the rules; ethical research |requires an understanding of the ethical imperatives behind the rules. The |fundamental ethical imperative behind the rules is that researchers seek to |do their jobs in a manner that will not cause unjustified harm to anyone. |But, most researchers work toward acting in an ethically ideal way -- |through their work and professional conduct, they seek to prevent harm |and to promote the good. Throughout the course, investigators and students |will be asked to think about the range of actions that count as responsible |conduct for the ethical researcher as well as identifying the rules that |researchers are expected to follow. How an institution decides to fulfill the above requirement varies from programs that are developed in-house or through the use of specialized educational service, such as that provided by CITI in it citiprogram; see: https://www.citiprogram.org/Default.asp? Students participating in undergraduate experimental psychology courses are required to take the citiprogram training at the student course level while people with increasing research participation and responsibilities take more advanced training (ranging from graduate student courses to full researchers). Having taken the citiprogram training myself, there is a good overlap with the material in the AP article I referred to in a previous post as well as, say, chapter 7 in the Bordens & Abbott (8th ed) text "Research Design and Methods" (on ethical treatment of subjects). I think that it is expected that anyone doing research today is familiar with the "Belmont Report" and its three core principles. Nowhere have I seen a "psychology exception" or "social science exception" (especially given Laud Humphrey's research on the "Tea Room Trade"; see his Wikipedia entry [yadda-yadda]): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laud_Humphreys Then again, perhaps I was wrong in my initial interpretation, that is, the person is a researcher and/or knowledgable about research but the focus of his comments are elsewhere but where? And then Annette Taylor posted a response to which Jim Clark posted a response which clarifies some things. Quoting from his response: |My concern would be that we are teaching students that psychological |research needs just as much oversight as medical research, which is |certainly not a universal view among psychologists and other social scientists. To which I say, perhaps that is a view among some psychologists and social scientists but, on the basis of my experience I think this is a naive view. If someone is just having human subjects learn lists of nonsense syllables to see how much they can retain, then I think that there is little risk to the subject (outside of a certain amount of boredom). But this is not the type of research that is being promoted, funded, or advocated for in a discipline where the new interpretative frame is that psychology is concerned primarily with affective and cognitive neuroscience. If anything, as psychology continues to promote itself as being a part of neuroscience, the issues of medical research become increasingly relevant. As an experimental psychology whose primary training was in cognitive psychology but with a specialty in research methods and data analysis, I have worked in psychiatric research on the biological basis of anxiety disorders, behavioral studies of hyperactivity, autism, and conduct disorder as well as substance abuse research which focused on cocaine abuse and its treatment both with medication and cognitive-beharioral therapy -- I tried to get in some good old-fashioned experimental research on human memory in there whenever I could. The point is that a psychologist cannot predict where he or she might wind up and what kind of research (or clinically oriented work) they might do. In any case, I think it is important to know and understand the history and role of ethics in research, especially medical research because federal law concerning ethical conduct is most concerned with this type of reearch (we season the presentation of medical research with a little bit of Milgram, Zimbardo, DiCaro, Breuning, and others for those with a taste for psychology). Of course, YMMV. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=9089 or send a blank email to leave-9089-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
