Comment 1 –
https://amyray19.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/animals-in-research/#comment-75
Comment 2 –
Comment 3 –
http://psuc2c.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/the-file-drawer-problem-3/#comment-39
Comment 4 –
http://dnf24.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/outliers/#comment-60
Thanks 🙂
Is it ethical to use internet sources as data for Qualitative research?
So this is my last blog ever (hopefully) and I’ve decided to talk about the question of whether it is ethical to use Internet sources as data for qualitative research?
As you already may know qualitative research is basically gathering information about a certain topic, however unlike quantitative research, it does not use numbers as the data. The main types of qualitative data are open-ended questionnaires, interviews and diary entries.
The problem we have with the ethical issue of obtaining your data from an internet source is that it may not be real data and it may have been made up by the internet source creator, this may make the actual data not valid and unreliable because the results are not what you have tested for and the results may not be able to be replicated in a replication study.
However, some people may argue that the data may actually be real and that it is an easier and cheaper way of collecting data, even though there is a risk of it not being real data.
Another important ethical issue is that if a researcher uses data from an internet source they may not have gained the persons permission who’s data it actually is to use that data in their research, so in other words they have not gained the person’s informed consent, this is a big ethical problem because under the bps standards if you do not have informed consent of that person you cannot use their data as a part of your results.
People may argue though that if someone puts something on the internet you are metaphorically signing a consent form because anyone can get a hold of anything that is on the internet, people may argue that if you don’t want people to use your data/ thoughts/ comments then you should not voice them over the internet.
I do agree with people who say that when you post something on the internet you are agreeing to let people use that information, however in a research perspective I think researcher should stick to the codes of practice that are officially set out, as a bid to keep research fair and to protect people’s confidentiality, which I think is very important to the development of research.
Overall, for official research that a person undertakes with a view to it being published I believe that if you are going to take information from an internet source I think you should get consent to use that information from the person who has made the comment.
Comment 1:Â
Â
Comment 2:Â
http://notwilliam.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/obsrvational-psychology/#comment-114
Â
Comment 3:Â
http://psuc0e.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/omg-have-you-heard/#comment-25
Â
Comment 4:Â
http://psucc5.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/why-is-the-file-drawer-problem-a-problem/#comment-49
Â
Thanks 🙂Â
As I was scouring the BBC for ideas about my blog topic this week, and I came across an interesting article, which is quite close to my heart.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9703000/9703651.stm
Basically, a study was conducted by Howard et al. to find whether the drug, Aricept, had any effect on the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s is a degenerative disease that is the most common cause of dementia. Alzheimer’s is a disease, which affects the brain, to put it in simple terms many of the brain cells die due to protein plaques on the brain.
If you want to read more about Alzheimer’s go here
http://alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/documents_info.php?documentID=100
The study was conducted on 272 Alzheimer’s patients and they found that the drug decreased the time taken for the symptoms to take effect. This means that it would give families more time with patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and it would give them a bearable quality of life. Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease for both the sufferer and also the family, it is difficult to watch a family member go through such a traumatic time.
Taking in to account these things it could be argued that the drug gives the patients and their families a better quality of life, certainly in my point of view I think this is a great thing to have been found because there was nothing worse than watching somebody lose their precious memories
However despite the advantages of giving sufferers the drug, in my opinion I would rather my family not have years and years of suffering and heartache through having to look after me and the onset being even slower than it already is.
Obviously some ethical issues are raised, such as at what point should they stop giving the drug to patients? and at what point would they not be able to give informed consent to take the drug? I believe that even though they may be in the very early stages of Alzheimer’s you may not be able to make correct decisions for yourself. On a contrasting point, people may argue that your family would be able to make the right decisions for you. I somewhat agree with this, however they may not know the long-term advantages and disadvantages of taking the drug. To overcome this I think people making this decision need to be educated and shown what life would be like with the drug or without the drug.
Overall, even though this topic is close to my heart and I may be a bit biased because there was a horrible time when a family member had Alzheimer’s disease. I believe that we should think sensibly about decisions, which can be made in haste and eventually turn out badly, as seen in the example given by the BBC, where a woman, who’s husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s who was taken off the drug, which then made his symptoms rapidly deteriorate faster than usual, which can be devastating for the family to go through. I don’t think many people would want their family to go through that and personally I wouldn’t want my family to go through that either.
I believe that more evidence is needed for the drug to be prescribed to every patient because it is not a cure and should not be used or thought of as a cure for the disease. And when that evidence is found then they should think about making the drug publically available.
Here is the original study
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa066583#t=articleDiscussion
Thanks for reading!
A Case study is a detailed analysis of an individual and their life; most of Freud’s theories came from case studies. During a case study the individuals surroundings and their whole life is assessed and they seek patterns to explain certain behaviours of that person. There are lots of different types of case studies; explanatory, exploratory, intrinsic, descriptive, collective and instrumental. There are also different methods of case studies; prospective and retrospective.
If you want to know more about the different part of a case study this is a good website that describes them really well
http://www.simplypsychology.org/case-study.html
A Single Subject Design is a research method that looks at an individual case (Much like a case study), the individual is their own control rather than another individual or group being the control. They are generally used to evaluate the interventions used in some parts of psychology.
The main difference between a case study and single case design is that with a case study the consequences of the behaviour will be due to natural occurrences and it is a non –experimental research design because the independent variable is not manipulated and whatever happen is due to completely natural factors.
Whereas a single subject design is an experimental research method where the independent variable is manipulated and the dependent variable will be because of a factor, which is the intervention the research wants to find out about.
Some people may argue that they are the same thing, however I feel that they are both completely separate things, the fact that a case study is a non-experimental design where as a single subject design is, this is the most important reason why they are both different.
Some examples of Case studies…
Little Hans – Was Freud’s most well known case study, he was a 5-year old little boy, who had a phobia of horses. He led Freud to develop the theory of the Oedipus complex
To read more about little Hans – http://www.simplypsychology.org/little-hans.html
Anna O – Another of Freud’s Case studies, she was a woman who, when caring for her sick father suffered from ‘hysteria’ and when she went for treatment found that talking about her experiences helped with relief from her problems. Freud suggested that this was due to childhood sexual abuse
To read more about Anna O – http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/content/98/6/465.full
Ethics are the correct code of practice that researchers need to adhere to when testing human participants and carrying out research. The British Psychological Society (BPS) has issued different codes of ethics, which Psychologists need to stick to when they are conducting research. The very basic ones are; informed consent, deception, protection from harm, debrief, withdrawal from the experiment and participant confidentiality. If you want to know more in detail about these ethics go to this website
The American Psychological Association (APA) also have guidelines, which Psychologists need to adhere too.
http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx
Stanley Milgram (1963) carried out one of the most famous studies in to obedience of all time; he wanted to discover the justification in to why people carried out the horrible acts during World War 2 and the Nuremburg war criminals. The experiment he carried out was only open to male participants, where they would be put in to a pairs and ‘flipped a coin’ to see which one would be the learner and which would be the teacher. The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates. The teachers were required to ask questions and if the learner got the question wrong the participant was required to give an electric shock, which gradually the voltage got higher. They found that 65% of participants carried on to the highest level of shocks.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html
Today Milgram’s experiment would not be allowed as it violates most of the ethical principles, such as deception and protection from harm. However in Milgram’s day there were not so many rules when it came to psychological experimentation. Some people would argue that without such experiments like Milgram’s we would not know as much about these subjects as we do today. So in a sense with the new ethical guidelines it may hinder the chances of future research.
However some people would argue that obtaining research in an ethical way is the safest way to collect data. Even though this might not give us the same results as we may find if we did not adhere to the ethical principles they may still show similar results due to careful manipulation of the experiment.
Overall I believe that even though the new ethical guidelines may hinder some research, I believe that it is necessary for the safety of the participants and experimenters and everyone else involved that the ethical consideration should be met and to get some results that you want isn’t worth risking the safety of a participant.
Qualitative methods of research involve trying to answer the question ‘why?’ whereas quantitative research aims to answer ‘how?’
Qualitative research methods use techniques such as questionnaires and interviews. A popular choice of methods is a semi-structured interview, where the participant is given free reign of what they say, they may also get a few prompt from the interviewer because they want to keep the participant on topic and to find out what they think of a subject.
It is a commonly thought throughout science, that qualitative research is not as important as quantitative research. I believe that this is a misconception because qualitative research helps us find out why something affects another and the views that a person has on a subject. This is valuable information because we can use it to make changes to have we operate things.
For example, a bit closer to home, at the end of our modules we are given module reflections, which are worth 1% of the overall mark for the module, this is where a student can give their views on the module and how it is taught. This method allows the universities to hear the views of the students about a particular module; it also allows them to make necessary changes for the future of the module.
However it can be argued that qualitative research methods are extremely subjective and that one person’s view of a subject can differ entirely to another’s. People argue that qualitative research cannot be empirically tested because it doesn’t involve numbers and the results may not be repeatable, thus lowering the reliability of the study.
However even though this may be the case I believe that qualitative research gives thought provoking evidence, which is valuable because we can use it to further our knowledge of a subject.
Some people see qualitative research as just being lazy, and maybe they are right because we don’t have to use SPSS to analyse the results we find, we also don’t need to work with numbers and ‘fiddle’ with the data. However qualitative data collection is extremely laborious, as I found out the past 2 weeks, where we were taught the in’s and out’s of qualitative methods. So as for people thinking qualitative data being the lazy way out of gathering information, its actually not.
For those who sit on the fence between the two methods, there is always a chance that during conducting an experiment that both sorts of methods can be used, these are called halfway house methods. This is good for a person like me who can never come to an exact conclusion as to which is better. However some data collection requires quantitative methods, such as gathering reaction time data, whereas other data collection, such as why a person likes something, needs qualitative research methods.
I believe that qualitative research methods do not violate the scientific method because it is a part of science, if quantitative methods strive to see the effect of one thing on another then surely if an effect is found then the following question would be why something has an effect. Only qualitative research methods can answer these questions.
Standard Error of Skewness 