Research Ethics Reflection

Reflect on your experience engaging with psychological research and focus on one key ethical issue, such as informed consent, confidentiality, or participant responsibility. Explain how this ethical issue influenced your experience and shaped your understanding of research ethics. Discuss any challenges or insights you encountered and consider how this has affected your view on the importance of ethical practices in psychology. Ensure your response is well-structured and clearly written, and (if necessary) properly cited.

• Your reflection should draw on various research participation experiences or research studies, and these experiences or readings should be reflected on through synthesising, comparing, and critically evaluating the ethical aspects and implications. The rubric includes a breadth of experience criterion.
• Please note that this task is NOT a research summary task. We are not asking you to research some interesting research papers and summarise what happened in the paper (we can read the abstract to find that out). The question that is being asked in this assessment is for you to reflect on what you have learned about research ethics by engaging with the paper you have read. What has it taught you about the ethical conduct of research? Read the chapter in this booklet that describes the assessment question.

Criteria for research papers

• Your self-reflection must be on a published, peer-reviewed article on psychological research that recruited human participants to complete an empirical study that you have read.
• The article must not be a literature review, meta-analysis or systematic review. It is strongly recommended that you ask your tutor if the article is appropriate.
• Your response must not be a description of the contents of the article, but a self-reflection of your experience of learning about ethics by reading it, and it must answer the topic question.
• The papers you choose must be from the list of suitable papers available on iLearn.

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Self-reflection on research engagement (≈230 words)

The paper that interested me most was the video-game study because I love games - but that also made me notice a different ethical dilemma: justice in who bears the burdens of research. In Anderson & Dill (2000), the second study, participants were drawn from a psychology subject pool at a large Midwestern university and preselected using the Caprara Irritability Scale which tests how irritable they are. That design choice efficiently tests theory, but it also concentrates the burdens of a provocation paradigm on students who are a population with limited bargaining power, and a higher-irritability subgroup, who may face greater distress or reputational sensitivity if data are ever re-identified. In the first study, GPA was obtained from the registrar, and linking that to trait labels (e.g., “irritable,” “aggressive”) and self-reported delinquency further heightens the stakes for these same participants.

Reflecting on this, I noted that fair selection is a sampling issue and an ethical consideration. If we knowingly recruit those more likely to react strongly, the consent must explicitly acknowledge targeted recruitment and describe tailored safeguards; otherwise, we risk exploiting vulnerability while generalising benefits to society at large.

Improvements I’d make would be to recruit beyond subject pools (community panels) or ensure the alternative-to-credit option is equivalent in time and value. When preselecting high-irritability participants, add enhanced monitoring (mid-session check-ins, easy stop/skip) and authorized-deception language upfront. Separate and minimise identifiers across datasets (trait scores, registrar GPA, delinquency), with a transparent deletion/retention schedule. Document and report a justice audit: who was invited, who participated, who declined, and whether burdens/benefits are fairly distributed.

This lens pushed me to see recruitment and preselection not as neutral logistics but as ethical design knobs that must be justified, safeguarded, and reported—not merely optimised for power.

Word count: 232

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Reference

Anderson, C. A., & Dill, K. E. (2000). Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4), 772–790.