Rebecca Coriam: Are Cruise Ships As Safe As We Think They Are?
SONA, Love it, Hate it, useful or useless
Welcome to my final blog for this year….wait no FOREVER!!!!! (Just saying)
We all know what SONA is, as students of Bangor University Psychology department we have been subjected to the Student Participation Panel for the past two years. Each semester all of us begrudgingly sign up to experiments which if you leave your SONA till the end of the semester then usually it will consist of sitting in a non-ventilated or non-heated room, usually staring at an out of date computer screen while being instructed to press one of two buttons. (if you’re lucky you may also get to press the space bar) While also praying that while we signed up for a study that is said to last 1 hour, it will in fact be over in 10 minutes. This is something that we have all come to accept as a part of our psychology course, and we do it because it’s an easy 10% at the end of the day. But does this method of recruiting participants ensure reliable data for the experimenter? Or does it mean that the amount of data collected is less valuable than it may otherwise have been?
Participants that are to be used in psychological research should in theory be randomly selected though this is obviously not an easy mission, especially when you have 3rd year undergrads and postgrads seeking data at the same time. As a result, 1st and 2ndyear students are forced into doing SONA. The problem with recruiting participants this way is that most turn out to be 18-21 year old students who are all studying psychology and sit SONA experiments on a regular basis. Admittedly we all come with our own experiences and backgrounds, so can to some extent offer data that can be generalised to the population. There are also a number of mature students, as I am myself but I personally feel that the selection process should be generalised a little more, maybe to other students of the university and not just psychology students, Because If the results at the end of the experiment are not relevant to the population then external validity is very low and reduces the implications the research has.
By just using psychology students, this means that not only are the results less generalizable than they should be, but there is an increased chance of students not participating as they would normally if randomly selected from the population. Agreed the majority of students participate in experiments to the best of their ability but there are a few that see it as a chore and see the experiments as a waste of their time so do anything they can just to get out of there. Most students will agree with me that after sitting numerous SONA experiments you dread having to do them and the only thing you are concerned with is when are you going to get out of there. As a result of this, attention and enthusiasm from the students are at an all-time low towards the task and this must surely effect the data collected.
So how do we rectify this problem?
Using other students of the university is one way, paying participants could be another way, but with this it turns out to be very cost, but at least your using more than just students for research.
To conclude, Thank god year two is almost over and we do not have to participate in anymore SONA experiments, well for those that have completed there’s already.
Have a good summer guys
Aside
The birth of research ethics began with a need to protect human subjects involved in research projects. The first attempt to design regulations began during the Doctors Trial of 1946-1947. The Doctors Trial was a segment of the Nuremberg Trials for Nazi war criminals. In the Doctors Trial, 23 German Nazi physicians were accused of conducting despicable and torturous experiment with concentration camp inmates. The accused physicians tortured abused, crippled, and murdered thousands of victims in the name of research. Some of their experiments involved collecting scientific information about the limits of the human body by exposing victims to extreme temperatures and altitudes.
To prosecute the accused Nazi doctors for the atrocities they committed, a list of ethical guidelines for the conduct of research – the Nuremberg Code – were developed.
http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/guidelines/nuremberg.html (List of guidelines)
The Nuremberg Code consisted of ten basic ethical principles that the accused had violated.
The Nuremberg Guidelines paved the way for the next major initiative designed to promote responsible research with human subjects, the Helsinki Declaration.
The Helsinki Declaration was developed by the World Medical Association and has been revised and updated periodically since 1964, with the last update occurring in 2008. The document lays out basic ethical principles for conducting biomedical research and specifies guidelines for research conducted either by a physician, in conjunction with medical care, or within a clinical setting. The Helsinki Declaration contains all the basic ethical elements specified in the Nuremberg Code but then advances further guidelines specifically designed to address the unique vulnerabilities of human subjects solicited to participate in clinical research projects. The unique principles developed within the Helsinki Declaration include:
http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/ (list of Guidelines)
Following the Helsinki Declaration, the next set of research ethics guidelines came out in the Belmont Report of 1979 from the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research.
This was established due to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, cited as arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Alabama by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis in poor, rural black men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-YMdaEdbcg&feature=related
The 40-year study was controversial for reasons related to ethical standards; primarily because researchers knowingly failed to treat patients appropriately after the 1940s validation of penicillin as an effective cure for the disease they were studying. Revelation of study failures led to major changes in U.S. law and regulation on the protection of participants in clinical studies. Now studies require informed consent, communication of diagnosis, and accurate reporting of test results.
http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/guidelines/belmont.html
The Nuremberg, Helsinki, and Belmont guidelines provided the foundation of more ethically uniform research to which rigorous rules and penalties for violation were attached. Governmental laws and regulations concerning the responsible conduct of research have since been developed for research that involves both human and animal subjects. The Animal Welfare Act provides guidelines and regulations for research with animals. The Protection of Human Subjects Regulations outlines the purpose and policies of oversight and approval, informed consent, and protections and policies for research with children, pregnant women, fetuses, prisoners, and mentally incompetent individuals. Currently, the focus of research ethics lies in the education of researchers regarding the ethical principles behind regulations as well as the oversight and review of current and potential research projects. The field has expanded from providing protections for human subjects to including ethical guidelines that encompass all parts of research from research design to the truthful reporting of results.
The birth of Ethics
The difference between a case study and single case designs.
Well here we are again, another day another blog….blah blah blah……
To first understand what the difference is between a case study and a single case design, we first need to understand what they both are. So these are my definitions and how I understand them.
A case study is an in-depth longitudinal analysis of an event, group, community or person of a single instance or event. Case study research is concerned with the intricacy and precise nature of the case being studied. The collecting of data, analyzing of information and reporting of the results is provided as a systematic way of looking at the event, group or individual. It helps the researcher gain a better understanding of what, why, where and when the case study happened as it did. Case studies lend themselves to both generating and testing hypotheses. Freud, used this type of research in his work and was able to develop his theories using case studies. He conducted in-depth studies with his patients to better understand their lives and help them overcome their problems and disorders. To build a case study information can be collected by Interviews, archival records, direct and participant observation and documentation.
Single subject designs are thought to be a direct result of the research of Skinner who applied the techniques of operant conditioning to subjects and measured the outcomes at various points in time. Because of this, single subject designs are often considered the design of choice when measuring behavioral change or when performing behavioral modification, because they are flexible and highlight individual differences in response to treatment or intervention Rather than comparing groups of subjects, this design relies on the comparison of treatment effects on a single subject or group of single subjects. This design is thoughtful to individual differences and often involves using a large number of participants in the study. Single-subject design has a number of necessities first being A baseline measure which is the gathering of crucial information. continuous assessment and variability in the data.
Hopefully i have now shown you the number of palpable differences between a case study and single case design. to re-cap, Firstly, a case study focuses on an individual whereas single case design studies will usually focus on a number of participants. Also a case study will only look at the history of its participant whereas a single-subject design looks at the treatment effects in one person and then compares it to that of another.
References:
http://allpsych.com/researchmethods/singlesubjectdesign.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
http://faculty.unlv.edu/pjones/singlecase/scsatool.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-subject_design
Why is the “file drawer problem” a problem?
The term ‘file drawer’ was coined by the psychologist Robert Rosenthai in1979.
The file drawer problem, is a problem in that many studies in research may be conducted but never reported, and those that are not reported may on average report different results from those that are reported. The term “file drawer” arises whenever the probability that a study is published depends on the statistical significance of its results. For e.g a null hypothesis of interest is true, i.e. the association being studied does not exist, but the 5% of studies that by chance show a statistically significant result are published, while the remaining 95% where the null hypothesis was not rejected rot in a researchers’ file drawer. Even a small number of studies lost “in the file drawer” can result in a significant bias.
Rosenthal’s work is used to set limits on the possibility that the file-drawer effect is causing a fabricated result. One of the clearest descriptions of the overall problem, and certainly the most influential in the social sciences, is:
Researchers and statisticians have long suspected that the studies published in the behavioural sciences are a biased sample of the studies that are actually carried out… . The extreme view of this problem, the “file drawer problem,” is that the journals are filled with the 5% of the studies that show Type I errors, while the file drawers back at the lab are filled with the 95% of the studies that show nonsignificant (e.g., p > .05) results. (Rosenthal, 1979, p. 638).
Click to access jse_14_1_scargle.pdf
Ethics and Children
Ethics……seems to be a subject I keep coming back to, so here goes for another week
I’m going to discuss ethics and children, its not a topic I have argued yet, so here goes.
Where to start….Children have been experimented on for many years and still to this day they are experimented on in the name of science. So where do ethics come in to protect these children….
Can children give consent to something they are not aware of…no.. it is up to the parent or guardian of the child to consent. One of the first documented experiments was conducted by Pavlov on conditioning with dogs but was later used by Watson 1920. The participant in the experiment was a child that Watson and Raynor called “Albert B.”, but is known popularly today as Little Albert. Around the age of nine months, Watson and Raynor exposed the child to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks and burning newspapers and observed the boy’s reactions. The boy initially showed no fear of any of the objects he was shown. he next time Albert was exposed to the rat, Watson made a loud noise by hitting a metal pipe with a hammer. Naturally, the child began to cry after hearing the loud noise. After repeatedly pairing the white rat with the loud noise, Albert began to cry simply after seeing the rat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSOj7XaWqFs
This experiment even though upsetting was given full consent by his guardian, but then this was a different era altogether, with no ethics around to protect them. Would parents today consent to this kind of experiment on their children, I would hope not.
The story of: 50,000 kids die by torture, fatal medical experiments done by Catholic, Anglican, United Church. This is a very disturbing story so don’t watch if easily upset. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7WL-TKFU8Y This was still going on up to 1996, these children died through cruel experimentation amoung other vile acts against them. Once again where was ethics to protect these children? The government refused to believe it was going on and still to this day nobody has been brought to justice over it.
Finally this is another clip of children with HIV being taken from their homes, put into care and experimented on without any consent given from either child or guardian. These children were made to take drugs that had no bearing on HIV or AIDS, these children were left to suffer and in some instances die as a result of these experiments. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8knwDqv_aU
To conclude, it would seem ethics, although evident to most of us, is still bitterly abused, the majority of the cases seem to be against children, who have no voice or guardian to protect them. I am sure there are research projects going on today that still mistreat their patients. Its children and people with disabilities I feel most sorry for where ethics are concerned as there does not seem to be enough guidelines to protect them against such heinous crimes. Ethics are there to protect all, but is it doing that, obviously there is a loop hole somewhere and certain researcher’s abuse that loop hole. I know certain ethics hinder research, but do we still in this day and age, feel the need to tactlessly abuse what was put into place to protect our fellow human beings.
smmitch 