Ethics in Research with Human Participants » (1st Edition)

Sales, Bruce D., PhD, JD (Univ of Arizona); Folkman, Susan, PhD (UCSF)

This volume is designed to sensitize researchers to the ethical issues that arise when using humans for psychological research. The nine chapters address recruitment, informed consent, privacy, and confidentiality, as well as establishing authorship and training of staff. An appendix furnishes the APA's ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct.

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Doody Review Services

Reviewer:Scott Levine, MD(Rush University Medical Center)
Description:This book is the result of a task force of the American Psychological Association.
Purpose:The task force was charged "to address newly emerging ethical issues in the conduct of research with human participants and to create an educational, advisory document that would promote scientific rigor within an ethical context and suggest practical solutions to ethical dilemmas.
Audience:According to the authors, this document is geared toward "undergraduates, graduates, faculty, basic and applied researchers in psychology and other disciplines involving human participants, and institutional review boards." However, this book rarely addresses the ethical dilemmas present in research that are not purely psychological in nature. For example, ethical dilemmas dealing with the risks and benefits of providing medical treatment are only briefly discussed. Thus, this book may not provide the depth that is needed in order to satisfy readers who conduct or ethically evaluate research that is not related to non-medical basic psychology.
Features:Essentially, this book consists of a main text, followed by appendixes containing the complete copies of the APA Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, the Code of Federal Regulations for the Protection of Human Subjects, and the Belmont Report. The main text, consisting of 128 pages, summarizes the moral foundations of ethical research, considerations researchers should make in planning their research (including issues of consent, privacy and confidentiality), the importance of maintaining subjects' trust and safety during studies, and a brief discussion of how to balance conflicting ethical objectives.
Assessment:Given the length of this book, it becomes impossible to cover any of these topics in great depth and, thus, it serves more as a brief review. It may be useful for a beginning psychological researchers so that they may recognize some of the more common ethical dilemmas encountered. However, once these ethical dilemmas are recognized, readers will have to look elsewhere to understand these dilemmas' history and meaning, or to assess how such dilemmas have been resolved in the past.