Research Methods and Statistics

CHAPTER PREVIEW

Most psychological research poses little physical or psychological risk to participants or involves few serious ethical issues. Nonetheless, because some researchers in the past have conducted notorious and unethical projects, laws and guidelines have been developed for the protection of research participants. Another problem is that researchers have made up data, invented entire experiments, and misrepresented their data in published journal articles.

Researchers generally become very interested and excited in their programs of research. Sometimes this means that they focus very narrowly in their work and forget to consider the implications of what they are doing. In this chapter, you will see that investigators may get so caught up in their research that they may endanger the people who participate in their studies.

The American Psychological Association has developed a set of guidelines that has evolved over the past half century. Many researchers in disciplines other than psychology rely on these guidelines. We must also follow legal requirements that federal and state governments have enacted for the protection of human participants in research.

Students sometimes mistakenly believe that the APA approves or vetoes research. It would be impossible for any single organization to oversee as much research as psychologists conduct. Ethical supervision occurs under the oversight of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) that evaluate proposed projects; this takes place in the colleges and universities where the research is carried out.

In discussing ethics in psychological research, the famous research of Stanley Milgram (1963) and Philip Zimbardo (1972) comes to mind. Milgram's research participants thought they were delivering electrical shocks to another person, often to the extent that the other person might have died. Zimbardo created a prison simulation that led participants, all of them students, to treat one another very brutally. This type of research is very rare in psychology, which is why the most illustrative examples of ethically controversial research occurred over 30 years ago.

We can categorize research in two groups for our discussion. In one category, involving clinically based research, the result of ignoring ethical dictates is potentially very serious. People approach clinical psychologists because of problems that need to be resolved. If clinical research involves ethical problems, those people could be seriously harmed.