36 CHAPTER 1
- Participants must be allowed to make an informed decision about participation.
This means that researchers have to explain the study to the people they want to
include before they do anything to them or with them—even children—and it has
to be in terms that the participants can understand. If researchers are using infants
or children, their parents have to be informed and give their consent, a legal term
known as informed consent. Even in single- or double-blind studies, it is necessary
to tell the participants that they may be members of either the experimental or the
control group—they just won’t find out which group they were actually in until
after the experiment is concluded.
- Deception must be justified. In some cases, it is necessary to deceive the partici-
pants because the study wouldn’t work any other way. For example, if you intend
to give the participants a test of memory at the end but don’t want them to know
about the test beforehand, you would have to withhold that part of the experiment.
The participants have to be told after the study exactly why the deception was
important. This is called debriefing.
- Participants may withdraw from the study at any time. The participants must be
allowed to drop out for any reason. For example, sometimes people get bored with
the study, decide they don’t have the time, or don’t like what they have to do. Chil-
dren participating in studies often decide to stop “playing” (play is a common part
of studies of children). Researchers have to release them, even if it means having to
get more participants.
- Participants must be protected from risks or told explicitly of risks. For exam-
ple, if researchers are using any kind of electrical equipment, care must be taken
to ensure that no participant will experience a physical shock from faulty electrical
equipment.
- Investigators must debrief participants, telling the true nature of the study and
expectations of results. This is important in all types of studies but particularly in
those involving a deception.
- Data must remain confidential. Freud recognized the importance of confi-
dentiality, referring to his patients in his books and articles with false names.
Likewise, psychologists and other researchers today tend to report only group
results rather than results for a single individual so that no one could possibly
be recognized.
- If for any reason a study results in undesirable consequences for the partic-
ipant, the researcher is responsible for detecting and removing or correcting
these consequences. Sometimes people react in unexpected ways to the manipu-
lations in an experiment, despite the researcher’s best efforts to prevent any neg-
ative impact on participants. If this happens, the researcher must find some way
of helping the participant overcome that impact (American Psychological Associ-
ation, 2002).
THINKING CRITICALLY
You are testing a new drug to treat a serious, often fatal medical condition. Before your experiment is
over, it becomes obvious that the drug is working so well that the people in the experimental group
are going to recover completely. Should you stop the experiment to give the drug to the people in the
control group?
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