Ethical considerations in psychological research: a guide

Four questions sit in this brief and they are more distinct than they first appear, so answer them in order and mark the transitions. Why it matters to consider ethics in psychological research. How the institutional review board process fulfils those considerations. What the implications for the field would be if no code of ethics existed. And what ethical considerations apply to the research you are proposing. The fourth is the one that reveals what kind of assignment this is: you have a study of your own in progress, and the essay is partly an ethics section for it. That means the first three questions should be answered in a way that sets up the fourth, so choose the principles and examples you will actually need later rather than a general tour of research ethics.

The first question includes a phrase worth noticing: the ethics, or lack thereof. It is inviting you to argue from consequence rather than from principle. The reason ethics matters in psychological research is not that ethical conduct is admirable, it is that human participants can be harmed by research in ways they cannot anticipate and often cannot detect, and that the person best placed to judge the risk is the person with the strongest interest in the study going ahead. That structural conflict, rather than any individual researcher's character, is the argument. Say it that way and you have explained why the safeguards are external and mandatory instead of professional and voluntary, which is exactly the ground the second question stands on. It also keeps the first answer short, which matters, because the fourth question is the one carrying the marks and it needs the room.

The second question asks how the review board process fulfils those considerations, and answering it properly requires knowing where the process came from. The Belmont Report, published in 1979 by a commission created by the National Research Act of 1974, sets out three principles: respect for persons, beneficence and justice. Its final section then translates them into three practical requirements, which are informed consent, assessment of risks and benefits, and equitable selection of subjects. Those three requirements are what a review board actually examines. Map the principles to the requirements to the review, and the answer becomes mechanical in the good sense: respect for persons produces the consent process, beneficence produces the risk-benefit assessment, and justice produces scrutiny of who is being recruited and who is being left out. Presenting it as that chain rather than as two separate lists is what turns a description of the process into an explanation of it.

The third question is the one most essays answer badly, because they answer it hypothetically. What would happen to psychology if no code of ethics existed is not a thought experiment. There was no such code, and we know what happened, which is why the commission that wrote the Belmont Report was created in the wake of the Tuskegee syphilis study becoming public. Psychology has its own examples in the same period, and the field's regulatory architecture was assembled in response to specific harms rather than in anticipation of possible ones. Answer historically and your case is evidential rather than speculative. Then extend it forward: without a code there is no shared standard against which a study can be criticised, no basis for refusing to publish, and no protection for the researcher who wants to say no.

The fourth question is where the essay earns its marks, because a generic ethics section is worth very little. Take your actual proposed study and work through the three Belmont requirements against it specifically. Who are your participants, and does anything about them affect their capacity to consent freely? What are the risks, and are they risks of harm, of distress, or of disclosure? How are you recruiting, and does that method systematically include or exclude anybody? If your study involves social media use, as many current proposals do, the disclosure risk is the live one: data that is technically public is not thereby ethically available, and participants often do not expect their online behaviour to be studied. Naming the specific ethical issue in your own design is far more convincing than reciting the principles again.

On structure and mechanics, keep the four questions visible. Use them as your section markers or as topic sentences, because a marker checking whether all four were addressed should not have to hunt. Cite the Belmont Report directly rather than a summary of it, since it is short, freely available and much quoted at second hand. Cite your discipline's own ethics code as well, because the question asks about a code of ethics for the field specifically rather than about human subjects regulation in general, and those are two different instruments with different scopes. And be careful with the historical examples: describe what happened accurately and briefly, because the point of including them is the argument they support, not the detail itself. A sentence of accurate description does more work here than a paragraph, and it leaves you the space to say what the field learned rather than only what was done.