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Video Transcript:

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review and in this video I’m going to cover the ethical guidelines put out by the American Psychological Association or APA for conducting psychological research.

And the first guideline is having informed consent. This just means that participants are informed of any risks of a study and they consent to participate. An important point here is that even after a participant gives their informed consent participation remains voluntary and that means they can quit at any time. So just because you agree to participate in a study doesn’t mean that you have to go all the way through to the end.

And in agreeing to participate, participants should have freedom from coercion. Now obviously this applies to physical coercion, so I can’t threaten to break your legs if you don’t participate but it applies to other types of coercion as well. So I can’t say I’m going to pay you $1000 to do this 5 minute study because that might coerce you into participating when you otherwise wouldn’t. And this would also apply to academic coercion. So I can’t tell my students that they’ll automatically get an A in my class if they just participate in my study.

So we need people to be free from coercion. We can offer some small rewards, I can pay people for their time but it has to be minimal, it can’t be considered a coercive amount of reward. Now, even after people have agreed to participate and they’ve agreed freely they are still protected from harm.

So I can’t physically harm my participants and I also can’t have psychological harm. So I can’t have really stressful situations that might have a lasting negative effect on a participant. Now I can have minor amounts of harm. So I can have things like small electric shocks or I can ask participants to hold their hands in ice water, which would be painful. Or I could show them images that might be upsetting or gruesome and stressful to participate in, but up in doing this the risks that participants take have to have a benefit.

So the next point is that there’s a risk benefit analysis. This means that are I can’t give people electric shocks just because I want to. I have to show that there’s a clear reason for having this small amount of harm and it has to be the minimum amount of risk necessary to get that benefit. The next point is that the data that we collect from participants should not be connected to their personal identity.

So it should be anonymous. This is easy to do when we have something like a survey or people enter data on a computer we can simply not collect their name and therefore the data will be anonymous. But in some cases this is impossible. So if I want to interview people face-to-face, obviously I’m going to see that this answer is connected to this person. In doing that when anonymity is impossible we should have confidentiality meaning that I don’t share this information that this participant gave this particular response.

Lastly we have a debriefing. The debriefing refers to informing the participant the purpose of the study. When the study is over we’ve collected all our data from the participant, we debrief them, we tell them what the study was about. This is where we would reveal any deception or misdirection that we might have used in a study. We would tell the purpose of why we had the person do that. Along with this we try to reverse any changes that we might have made in a participant. So for instance if I gave you a task that intentionally made you frustrated, I would reveal this to you during the debriefing and I would attempt to undo that frustration that you were feeling.

So these are the main ethical guidelines that cover human subjects in psychological research. I hope you found this helpful. If so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more.

Thanks for watching!