The journalist writes that Black Americans have been proportionally less willing to participate in vaccine trials, perhaps because researchers in the past have violated their trust. Photo: Andrey_Popo/Shutterstock At time of writing (late 2020), researchers around the world are racing to test vaccines for the covid-19 virus. To test the efficacy and safety fo these …
Category: Ethics
Screen time (again!)
The effect of screen time on well-being is likely to depend on moderators such as what's on the screen, when it's used, and who's using it. Photo: Eric Nathan / Alamy Stock Photo I can't promise this is the last article on screen time research that I will blog about. But this long-form piece by …
How should physicians be scheduled? Ethics of a new study.
Why might it be ethical to assign medical residents to 30 hour shifts, in the name of research? Photo: Shutterstock How many hours in a row should we expect physicians to work in a single shift? Is a 30 hour shift too long? Although residency programs now limit shifts to 16-hours, it used to be …
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Psychology’s Reproducibility Project
Replication is the act of conducting a study again. If the study gets the same result twice (or more), we say that the study's findings are replicable. Chapter 14 in the book describes three types of replications: Direct replication, conceptual replication, and replication-plus-extension. This blog post is about direct replications. In the last few years, …
Does international aid work?
These Bangladeshi girls received aid from BRAC, the same program that was investigated in this study. Photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images Do international aid programs work? Many of us send money to an organization like Heifer International, Mercy Corps, or Oxfam. Does the money these programs invest, either through direct aid, microloans, gifts of livestock, or …
The fallout of an unethical study
July is turning out to be Ethics Month at EverydayResearchMethods blog. Here's a great piece about the damage that was done by a case of data fabrication. In 1998, a physician named Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a study on 12 sample of patients whose autism symptoms, he claimed, had appeared right after receiving the vaccine …
The ethics of “the facebook experiment”
Recently, Internet commentators have been discussing the ethics of an experiment conducted on Facebook. The paper was published this month in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). You can read one account of the ethics of this study in Slate, here, and read other versions all over the Internet, including …
Ethics: New examples of fraud in psychology
Two more reports of research fraud have surfaced in the subfield of social psychology. You can read about two new suspected cases in this news piece by the journal Nature. Read the article and think about these questions: a) Are the cases described here examples of data falisification or data fabrication? (Is this possible to determine from …
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A recent case of research fraud
A social psychologist is in the news this month. He admitted to fabricating and falsifying data: the data in dozens of published studies by this scientist are suddenly suspect. Here's a version of the story in the New York Times. a.) Data falsification and fabrication are two slightly different problems. How are they different? …
Ben Goldacre on TED
Here's Ben Goldacre in a 20-minute TED video talking about his favorite topic, Bad Science. He addresses the journal-to-journalism cycle, the flaws of authority, the placebo effect, industry-sponsored trials, publication bias, correlation/causation, ethics, and more. The overall message is the importance of publishing all data--both for and against a drug, therapy, or intervention. Ben Goldacre …