The consent form provides an opportunity for the participants to indicate that they understand the arrangements for the research and give their agreement to take part in the research in the light of these. The typical consent form probably should cover the following points, though perhaps modified in parts:
z The title of the research project.
z I have been informed about and understand the nature of the study. Yes/No z Any questions that I had were answered to my satisfaction. Yes/No z I understand that I am free to withdraw myself and my data from the
research at any time with no adverse consequences. Yes/No z No information about me will be published in a form which might
potentially identify me. Yes/No
z My data, in an anonymous form, may be used by other researchers. Yes/No z I consent to participate in the study as outlined in the information sheet. Yes/No z Space for the signature of the participant, their name in full, and the date
of the agreement.
8.6 Data management
Data management includes some issues very closely related to ethical matters; however, it is different. Ethical matters, as we have seen, are not driven primarily by legislation whereas data management issues have a substantial basis in legislation. Data protection, in European countries, is required by legislation to cover all forms of recorded informa-tion whether it is digitally stored on a computer, for example, or in hard copy form in filing cabinets. The university or college that you study at should have a data protection policy. The department that you study in is also likely to have its own policy on data protection. Now data protection is not mainly or substantially about data in research; it is far wider than that. Data protection covers any personal data which are held by an organisation for whatever purpose. There are exemptions but the legislation is likely to apply to anything that you do professionally and even as a student of psychology.
It covers things such as application forms, work and health records, and much more – anything which involves personal data period. So it is vital to understand data manage-ment in relation to your professional work in psychology in the future since you will almost certainly collect information from clients and others which comes under the legislation. Research is treated positively in data protection legislation in the UK.
The good news is that data protection legislation does not apply if the personal data are in anonymous form. Essentially this means that the data should be anonymous at the point of collection. This could be achieved, for example, by not asking those completing a questionnaire to give their name or address or anything like that. It might be wise to avoid other potentially identifiable information in order to be on the safe side – for example, just ask for their year of birth rather than the precise date if the latter risks identifying participants. All of this needs some thought. It obviously imposes some limits on what you can do – for example, you could not contact the participant to take part in a follow-up to the study and you cannot supplement the data that you have with additional information from other sources. But most of the time you would not want to do these things anyway.
Of course, some data inevitably will allow for the identification of a research participant.
Just because they are not named does not mean that they are not identifiable. For example, videoed research participants may well be identifiable and individuals with a particular job within an organisation may also be identifiable by virtue of that fact. So it is possible that data protection legislation applies. It is immaterial in what form the data are stored – hard copy, digital recording media, or what-have-you: if the data are personal and the person is identifiable then the act applies. What follows will be familiar from parts of the previous section. Data protection requires that the researcher must give consideration to the safe keeping of identifiable personal data. So it includes the question of which people have access to the data. Probably this is all that you need to know about data protection but organisations will have their own data protection officers from whom you may seek advice if necessary.
8.7 Conclusion
Research ethics cover virtually every stage of the research process. The literature review, for example, is covered by the requirements of fidelity and other stages of the process have specific recommendations attached to them. It is in the nature of ethics that they do not simply list proscribed behaviours. Frequently they offer advice on what aspects of research require ethical attention and the circumstances in which exceptions to the generally accepted standards may be considered. They impose a duty on all psychologists to engage in consideration and consultation about the ethical standing of their research as well as that of other members of the psychological community. Furthermore, the process does not end prior to the commencement of data collection but requires attention and vigilance throughout the research process since new information may indicate ethical problems where they had not been anticipated.
One important thing about ethics is that they require a degree of judgement in their application. It is easy for students to seek rules for their research. For example, is it unethical to cause a degree of upset in the participants in your research? What if your research was into experiences of bereavement? Is it wrong to interview people about bereavement knowing that it will distress some of them? Assume that you have carefully explained to participants that the interviews are about bereavement. Is it wrong then to cause them any distress in this way? What if the research was just a Friday afternoon practical class on interviewing? Is it right to cause distress in these circumstances? What if it were a Friday workshop for trainee clinical psychologists on bereavement counselling?
Is it any more acceptable? All of this reinforces the idea that ethics are fine judgements, not blanket prohibitions for the most part. Of course, ethics committees may take away some of this need for fine judgement from researchers.
The consideration of ethics is a fundamental requirement of the research process that cannot be avoided by any psychologist – including students at any level. It starts with not fiddling the data and not plagiarising. And what if your best friend fiddles the data and plagiarises?
z Psychological associations such as the American Psychological Association and the British Psychological Society publish ethical guidelines to help their members behave morally in relation to their professional work. Self-regulation of ethics is a characteristic of professions.
z Ethics may be based on broad principles, but frequently advice is provided in guidelines about their specific application, for example, in the context of research. So one general ethical principle is that of integrity, meaning accuracy, honesty and truthfulness. This principle clearly has different implications to the use of deception in research from those when reporting data.
z Informed consent is the principle that participants in research should willingly consent to taking part in research in the light of a clear explanation by the researcher about what the research entails. At the same time, participants in research should feel in a position to withdraw from the research at any stage with the option of withdrawing any data that have already been provided. There are exceptions where informed consent is not deemed necessary – especially naturalistic observations of people who might expect to be observed by someone since they are in a public place.
z Deception of participants in research is regarded as problematic in modern psychology despite being endemic in some fields, particularly social psychology. Nevertheless, there is no complete ban on deception, only the requirements that the deception is absolutely necessary since the research is important and there is no effective alternative deception-free way of conducting it. The response of participants during debriefing to the deception may be taken as an indicator of the risks inherent in that deception.
z The publication of research is subject to ethical constraints. The fabrication of data, plagiarism of the work of others, claiming the role of author on a publication to which one has only minimally contributed, and the full acknowledgement by first authorship of students’ research work are all covered in recent ethical guidelines.
z Increasingly there are more formal constraints on researchers such as those coming from ethics committees and the increased need to obtain research participant’s formal consent. Although data protection legislation can apply to research data, data in an anonymous/unidentifiable form are exempt from the legislation.
Key points
ACTIVITIES
Are any principles of ethical conduct violated in the following examples? What valid arguments could be made to justify what occurs? These are matters that could be debated. Alternatively, you could list the ethical pros and cons of each before reaching a conclusion.
(a) Ken is researching memory and Dawn volunteers to be a participant in the research. Ken is very attracted to Dawn and asks for her address and mobile phone number, explaining that she may need to be contacted for a follow-up inter-view. This is a lie as no such interviews are planned. He later phones her up for a date.
(b) A research team is planning to study Internet sex offenders. They set up a bogus Internet pornography site – ‘All tastes sex’. The site contains a range of links to specialised pages devoted to a specific sexual interest – bondage, mature sex, Asian women and the like. Visitors to the site who press these links see mild pornographic pictures in line with the theme of the link. The main focus of the researchers is on child pornography users on the Internet. To this end
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they have a series of links labelled ‘12-year-olds and under’, ‘young boys need men friends’, ‘schoolgirls for real’,
‘sexy toddlers’ and so forth. These links lead nowhere but the researchers have the site programmed such that visitors to the different pages can be counted. Furthermore, they have a ‘data miner’ which implants itself onto the visitor’s computer and can extract information from that computer and report back to the researchers. They use this information in order to send out an e-mail questionnaire concerning the lifestyle of the visitor to the porn site – details such as their age, interests, address and so forth as well as psychological tests. To encourage completion, the researchers claim that in return for completing the questionnaire, they have a chance of being selected for a prize of a Caribbean holiday. The research team is approached by the police who believe that the data being gathered may be useful in tracking down paedophiles.
(c) A student researcher is studying illicit drug use on a university campus. She is given permission to distribute questionnaires during an introductory psychology lecture. Participants are assured anonymity and confidentiality, although the researcher has deliberately included questions about demographic information such as the participants’
exact date of birth, their home town, the modules they are taking and so forth. However, the student researcher is really interested in personality factors and drug taking. She gets another student to distribute personality questionnaires to the same class a few weeks later. The same information about exact date of birth, home town, place of birth and so forth is collected. This is used to match each drug questionnaire with that same person’s personality questionnaire.
However, the questionnaires are anonymous since no name is requested.
(d) Professor Green is interested in fascist and other far-right political organisations. Since he believes that these organisations would not permit a researcher to observe them, he poses as a market trader and applies for and is given membership of several of these organisations. He attends the meetings and other events with other members. He is carrying out participant observation and is compiling extensive notes of what he witnesses for eventual publication.
(e) A researcher studying sleep feels that a young man taking part in the research is physically attracted to him. She tries to kiss him.
(f ) Some researchers believe that watching filmed violence leads to violence in real life. Professor Jenkins carries out a study in which scenes of extreme violence taken from the film Reservoir Dogs are shown to a focus group. A week later, one of the participants in the focus group is arrested for the murder of his partner on the day after seeing the film.
(g) A discourse analyst examines President Bill Clinton’s television claim that he did not have sexual intercourse with Monica Lewinsky in order to assess discursive strategies that he employed and to seek any evidence of lying. The results of this analysis are published in a psychology journal.
(h) ‘Kitty Friend complained to an ethics committee about a psychologist she read about in the newspaper who was doing research on evoked potentials in cat brains. She asserted that the use of domesticated cats in research was unethical, inhumane, and immoral’ (Keith-Spiegel and Koocher, 1985, p. 35). The ethics committee chooses not to consider the complaint.
(i) A psychology student chooses to investigate suicidal thoughts in a student population. She distributes a range of personality questionnaires among her friends. Scoring the test she notices that one of her friends, Tom, has scored heavily on a measure of suicide ideation and has written at the end of the questionnaire that he feels desperately depressed. She knows that it is Tom from the handwriting, which is very distinctive.
(j) Steffens (1931) describes how along with others he studied the laboratory records of a student of Wilhelm Wundt, generally regarded as the founder of the first psychological laboratory. This student went on to be a distinguished pro-fessor in America. Basically the student’s data failed to support aspects of Wundt’s psychological writings. Steffens writes that the student
must have thought . . . that Wundt might have been reluctant to crown a discovery which would require the old philosopher [Wundt] to rewrite volumes of his lifework. The budding psychologist solved the ethical problem before him by deciding to alter his results, and his papers showed how he did this, by changing the figures item by item, experiment by experiment, so as to make the curve of his averages come out for instead of against our school. After a few minutes of silent admiration of the mathematical feat performed on the papers before us, we buried sadly these remains of a great sacrifice to loyalty, to the school spirit, and to practical ethics.
(p. 151)