Warm-Up Activity 7.1: Review APA Code of Ethics

This week, take time to review Standard 8: Research and Publication of Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct With the 2010 Amendments, located under your weekly resources.

Warm-Up Activity 7.2: IRBs and Human Participants

Read the information located under your weekly resources about Institutional Review Boards and experiments with human participants at:

    American Psychological Association. (2012). Responsible conduct of research. Washington, DC.
    U.S. Health and Human Services Department. (n.d.). Informed consent frequently asked questions.

Assignment

APA Ethical Standard 8.02 emphasizes the need for psychologists to inform participants about the purpose of the research, expected duration, and procedures. It requires psychologists to inform participants of their right to decline to participate and to withdraw from the research once participation has begun and the foreseeable consequences of declining or withdrawing. It also requires that participants be informed about the limits of confidentiality and incentives for participation. Rebers, Aaronson, and Schmidt (2016) identified three main categories of reasons for waiving the informed consent requirement: (1) decrease of data validity and quality; (2) distress or confusion of participants; and (3) practical problems. Practical problems include the possibility of selection or consent bias, which may result when the group giving researchers access to their data differs from the group denying access (Rothstein & Shoben, 2013).

You are preparing to submit a research project to the Institutional Review Board(IRB). This is hypothetical and you will not have to actually develop the proposal. However, you will have to justify the reason you are providing only very limited informed consent. You have decided to study how a very noisy environment differentially affects male adults and female adults, or boys and girls. One of the areas you are assessing is their ability to complete a reading comprehension task under those conditions. Your hypothesis is that female adults and girls will be less affected by high level noise than male adults and boys. If you provide informed consent, you may contaminate the results.

To support your decision, you will provide the IRB an Annotated Bibliography consisting of research, which omitted informed consent.

The first step in this assignment is to find examples of research that omitted informed consent or examples in which informed consent may have contaminated the results. You may include examples of informed consent when the subjects are minors. The second step is to summarize your research in Annotated Bibliography format. You must include a utility statement for each entry concerning the relevance of the article in supporting your decision to omit informed consent.

After completing the Annotated Bibliography, you will write a brief paper that summarizes your argument based on the articles you have reviewed.

Length: 8 annotated entries, and a 1-page summary paper

Your assignment should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards where appropriate. No older than 8 years.

References

Rebers, S., Aaronson, N. K., van Leeuwen, F. E., & Schmidt, M. K. (2016). Exceptions to the rule of informed consent for research with an intervention. BMC Medical Ethics, 171. doi:10.1186/s12910-016-0092-6

Rothstein, M. A., & Shoben, A. B. (2013). Does consent bias research? The American Journal of Bioethics: AJOB, 13(4), 27-37. doi:10.1080/15265161.2013.767955