Informed Consent

The British Psychological Society’s Ethical Principles for Conducting Research with Human Participants code was revised and published in 1990. This code was a universally used document; many institutions and research funding bodies have used the code to inform their own research ethic policies and practices. The understanding of ethics in research are continuously changing and evolving which has led to the revisions of the British Psychological Society’s Code of Ethics and Conduct being revised in 2006 and 2009, these revisions have also influenced thinking in this area. There are diverse reasons as to why it is important for research to be ethical. It is becoming increasingly important that participants should have confidence in their investigators

Participants need to know what it is they are agreeing to, although some studies require deception which is acceptable if the participant is fully debriefed after their participation in the study. The participants need to know and be constantly reminded that they have the right to withdraw at any time before, during or after the experiment. The participant has the right to ask for their data to be fully or partially destroyed and therefore their data will not be used in any part of the research. It is important to explore who is able to give informed consent; participants under the age of 18 would need to get consent on their behalf from either a parent or guardian. Also those who are mentally or physically impaired which may result in them being unable to provide informed consent, similarly to children, may need to get a guardian or parent to give consent on their behalf. The term ‘informed’ means that the consent forms should be accompanied with an information sheet which includes details of what the participant should expect from the experiment, details of the investigators and how they can be contacted. It is acceptable to not receive informed consent as long as what happens to the participants could occur in their everyday

Type 1; deliberate misleading of participants which may include the use of confederates, staged manipulations in field experiments such as deceptive institutions. Type 2; deception by omission which could be creating ambiguity and failure to enclose fill information about the study prior to the study commencing. Researchers should avoid deceiving participants about the nature of the research unless there is no alternative; this would require to be deemed acceptable by an individual expert. Milgram (1963) was highly criticised for his obedience study. Participants were recruited as volunteers for a lab experiment which was investigating ‘learning’. Participants were made up of 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area. Although they volunteered to participate in the study, they were paid $4.50 for just turning up. Each participant was introduced to another participant, who was actually a confederate. They picked straws to determine their roles, either a learner or teacher; this was fixed and the confederate was always the learner. The learner was strapped to a chair with electrodes, in a separate room to the participant who was