PS300 Unit 6 Research Ethics Seminar Reflection Example

Is It Fair to Watch Strangers? A PS300 Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on the Ethics of Observation

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS300: Research Methods I

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the classmates and the project are composite; the ethical standards and studies cited are real.

What I Assumed

Before the Unit 6 seminar I thought my project had no ethical issues. I planned to stand on a public sidewalk and count pedestrians using phones while crossing. No one would be named, photographed or asked anything. I assumed that ethics was about experiments with deception or medical risk, not about watching people do something in public, and I expected the seminar to be interesting but irrelevant to my project.

The Seminar

Our instructor began with the APA Ethics Code, which allows observation in public places without informed consent when no one is identified and the research would not reasonably be expected to cause distress or harm (American Psychological Association, 2017). That seemed to settle it. Then she asked us to apply that standard to our own projects and look for anything that might cause harm.

A classmate who works as an emergency medical technician asked what I would do if I saw a pedestrian about to step in front of a turning car while looking at a phone. I said I would shout a warning, without thinking twice. She pointed out that this would change the behavior I was studying and that my plan did not say what to do in that case. A second classmate asked whether I was recording anything that could identify people. I said no, but she noted that I planned to record age group by appearance, and asked how I would avoid coding people unfairly by how old they looked, which might reflect bias about clothing, posture or skin.

Low risk is not the same as no risk, and the difference shows up in the details of a coding sheet.

What Changed

Three things changed in my plan. First, I added a safety rule: if a pedestrian is in immediate danger, the observer will warn them, and that event will be excluded from the data. Protecting people matters far more than a clean observation, and stating the rule in advance means the decision is not made in panic. Second, I reconsidered the age variable. I had included it because Thompson et al. (2013) adjusted for age, but my judgments of age from across a street would be rough, and the second classmate's point about bias made me doubt they were worth recording. I will keep only two broad groups, under 30 and 30 or older, and report them as rough estimates with that limitation stated. Third, I now describe my study as minimal risk rather than no risk, because careful thought revealed small ways it could go wrong for the strangers I would never meet.

What the Revisions Cost

Every one of these changes costs something. The safety rule means that the most dangerous crossings, the ones I most want to understand, may be the ones I exclude, so my data could slightly understate how risky phone use is. Collapsing age into two groups makes it harder to compare my results with studies that used finer categories. And describing the study as minimal risk means writing a short paragraph about those risks in the report, which takes space I had planned to use for results. I decided all three costs were worth paying. A study that ignored an imminent injury, or coded strangers by a guess that reflected bias, would be less trustworthy even if its numbers looked cleaner. Knowing the costs also tells me what to mention in my limitations section.

What I Learned About Ethics

I had thought of ethics as a set of rules that either apply or do not. The seminar showed me that ethics is a habit of asking how a study could harm someone, even when the rules permit it. Respect for persons, one of the three principles in the federal commission's 1979 report, applies even when people never know they were studied, because it asks the researcher to treat them as people rather than data points (National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1979).

What I Still Wonder

I am still unsure whether observing people without their knowledge is fully respectful, even when the rules allow it. My study could not be done if pedestrians knew they were being watched, since they would cross more carefully. That trade-off seems justified for a low-risk public behavior, but I would like to understand where researchers draw the line when the behavior is more private.

References

American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct (2002, amended effective June 1, 2010, and January 1, 2017). https://www.apa.org/ethics/code

National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. (1979). The Belmont report: Ethical principles and guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Thompson, L. L., Rivara, F. P., Ayyagari, R. C., & Ebel, B. E. (2013). Impact of social and technological distraction on pedestrian crossing behaviour: An observational study. Injury Prevention, 19(4), 232-237. https://doi.org/10.1136/injuryprev-2012-040601