This assignment is designed to help you develop deep understanding of research ethics in high education study. Collect and analyse ethics related information to deal with an interested research work. Have a comprehensive understanding of ethics policy used in your education institute, state and residential nation.
Task:
Choose one of the two options below to write up an assay for conducting ethical research in science or social science study.
Option 1:
Outline an interested research topic and proposed approach (what are you going to implement your research work) for your master degree study and identify the associated ethical, integrity and safety issues and risks associated with what you are proposing.
For each identified area how will these be addressed through the proposed approach to key aspects of the research and how can you substantiate that the approach you are proposing to deal with the identified risks is defensible ethically in relation to codes for research and professional conduct relevant to the field?
The material you develop in this topic will be able to be directly incorporated into your research project and/or ethics application.
Option 2:
Choose one of the following research cases and write a report on the ethics issues that may happen. You need to consider both pros and cons of certain type of research. Together with the ethics issues you will consider in the chosen case, you also need to provide the response plan to solve the problems according to the ethics policies, principles, rules in VU, VIC state and Australia.
Research Cases:
Genetic Engineering
Nuclear Testing
Human drug trials (pharmacological research)
Customer expectation study on online gaming
Browser experience satisfaction on VU website
Animal research involving non-primates
Animal research involving primates
Nervous system research
Gambler behavioral analysis
Speech recognition
Smartphone hacking simulation/testing in real workplace environment
Medical history storing and sharing among public clinics via cloud computing technology
Sleep quality study
General Criteria for both options:
You may need to consider some or more of the following aspects in your analysis if applicable:
research design;
recruitment and gaining informed consent;
protection of human and/or animal rights;
vulnerability of your proposed participants and power differential in relationships;
data gathering approaches;
maintaining anonymity and/or confidentiality, data integrity and management, including dealing with data privacy and security issues;
record keeping;
laboratory and field procedures;
avoiding or minimizing social, psychological, legal and physical risks;
ensuring animal welfare and bio-safety etc;
health and safety for researcher and other research assistants.
For each aspect, you also need to provide response actions, solutions for the ethical issues, integrity and safety issues and risks that may occur.
