ARAŞTIRMA YÖNTEMLERİ - Deneme Sınavı - 7

Autonomy is the capacity of a participant to make a reasoned decision for himself/herself, for example, whether to take part in a research voluntarily. Autonomy is the participants’ ability to decide for themselves how to live their own lives, according to their own desires and values. A person’s autonomy may be violated through manipulation, trickery, or deceit as well as by forcing him/her to do things against his/her will.  The correct answer is C.

The main role of a research ethics committee (REC) is to regulate the ethical conduct of research before it is carried out, including plain language statements in the material provided to participants. In some occasions, RECs may also require some changes/alterations to research projects before they allow them to continue. For instance, if the information sheets for informed consent are considered to be too long to read in a reasonable time and too difficult to easily understand, the researchers can be recommended to modify the information sheet at an appropriate reading level. Research shows that, for instance, the information sheets can be too long to be read in a reasonable time and too difficult to be easily understood and that they need to be at a reading grade level of eight or below. In other words, the information provided in ISs should be such that could be easily comprehended by a person who has received only eight years of schooling. The correct answer is A.

Virtue ethics treats the character of the researchers as the primary focus of ethical evaluation. Virtue ethics refers to a researcher’s possession of certain traits/virtues as part of his/her character/personality such as being kind, generous, courageous, just, and prudent, etc. Researchers should have the capacity to make sound judgements. In choice E, the key words describe Relational Ethics (Ethics of Care). The correct answer is E.

Exiting ethics considers ethical issues beyond the data collection process in terms of how researchers should leave the field and share their research findings so as to avoid unjust/unintended consequences. The correct answer is B.

According to Hammersley and Traianou, the issue of informed consent arises primarily in the following three situations:

In choice D, since the documents are publicly available, an informed consent may not be necessary. However, care must be taken to obtain permission to use the document from the authors or institutions when necessary. The correct answer is D.

According to the Declaration of Helsinki each potential subject must be adequately informed of the aims, methods, sources of funding, any possible conflicts of interest, institutional affiliations of the researcher, the anticipated benefits and potential risks of the study and the discomfort it may entail, poststudy provisions and any other relevant aspects of the study. The potential subject must be informed of the right to refuse to participate in the study or to withdraw consent to participate at any time without reprisal. Special attention should be given to the specific information needs of individual potential subjects as well as to the methods used to deliver the information. Even though it is necessary to mention the institutional affiliations of the researcher, the CV or resume of the researcher may not be included as the consent form would become too long. The correct answer is E.

In a study by Duncan et. al, on “self-management of chronic illness in adolescents” the researchers were conducting semi-structured interviews. Participants included adolescents aged between 10 and 18 years, who had one of the following four chronic conditions: asthma, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, or leukemia. While conducting interviews, a 16-years-old participant (named Toby) disclosed details of poor adherence with medication, which had significant health implications. The researchers were in a dilemma between respecting Toby’s autonomy/confidentiality and protecting his health. The correct answer is C.

Virtue Ethics: An ethical perspective that treats the character of researchers as the primary focus of ethical evaluation.

Principle-based ethics: An ethical perspective that is based on the principles of respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice.

Relational Ethics: An ethical perspective that focuses on the importance of the relationships between the researcher and participants.

Situation-based ethics stresses that there would always be cases for ethical dilemmas that would be difficult to solve, and therefore there would always be disagreements about what is good/bad or right/ wrong in particular research settings/situations.

The consequentialist/utilitarian ethics perspective represents a radical rejection of deontological ethics. It argues that “Rather than being guided by general rules specifying duties and rights, actions must be judged, prospectively, in terms of how well designed they are to produce good outcomes, and, retrospectively, according to whether or not they actually produced such outcomes” (Hammersley and Traianou, 2012, p. 22).

The correct answer is A.

The Zimbardo Prison Experiment was carried out by Philip Zimbardo (1973) in 1971 as a prison experiment in which some male college students were recruited and randomly assigned the roles of “guard” and “prisoner.”

The correct answer is B.

Emanuel, Wendler and Christine (2000, pp. 2703- 2707) propose the following seven requirements as a coherent framework for making research ethical:

• Value (i.e., whether the proposed research has the potential to improve knowledge and/or understanding),

• Scientific validity (i.e., whether the proposed research is methodologically rigorous),

• Fair subject selection (i.e., whether the participants are chosen based on the scientific objectives rather than vulnerability and/or privilege),

• Favorable risk-benefit ratio (i.e., whether the benefits of the proposed research outweigh the risks for the participants),Independent review (i.e., whether the proposed research has been approved by an unaffiliated expert/institution such as a REC and/or an IRB),

• Informed consent (i.e., whether the researcher informed his/her participants about the aim of the research and obtained their voluntary consent),

• Respect for enrolled subjects (i.e., whether the researcher has taken the proper precautions to protect the privacy of participants, to enable them to withdraw from the research at any phase if they wish to do so, and to ensure their safety and well-being).

The correct answer is D.

Christians  postulates the following four ethical principles:

• Informed consent (i.e., the participants’ right to be informed about the nature and consequences of the research in which they are involved),

• Deception (i.e., the researchers’ obligation to design and conduct research free of active deception and/or exploitation),

• Privacy and confidentiality (i.e., the researchers’ obligation to secure or conceal all personal data belonging to research participants, for example, by using pseudonyms),

• Accuracy (i.e., the researchers’ obligation not to fabricate, duplicate and/or omit any research data).

The correct answer is A.

Economic and Social Research Council’s (2015, p. 3) Framework for Research Ethics lists the following six key ethical principles:

• Research should be designed, reviewed and undertaken to ensure integrity, quality and transparency.

• Research staff and participants must normally be informed fully about the purpose, methods, and intended possible uses of the research, what their participation in the research entails and what risks, if any, are involved…

• The confidentiality of information supplied by research participants and the anonymity of respondents must be respected.

• Research participants must take part voluntarily, free from any coercion.

• Harm to research participants must be avoided in all instances.

• The independence of research must be clear, and any conflicts of interest or partiality must be explicit.

The correct answer is E.

According to Hammersley and Traianou (2012, p. 62), the potential threats of harm arising from research can fall into the following five categories:

• Pain, physical injury, and permanent disability.

• Psychological damage, for instance emotional distress, erosion of self confidence, stress-related illness, and so on.

• Material damage of some kind, for example loss of one’s freedom through imprisonment, dismissal from one’s job, reduction in income or wealth, damage to property, and so on.

• Damage to reputation or status, or to relations with significant others, for example through the disclosure of information that was previously unknown to some relevant audience.

• Damage to a project in which people are engaged, to some group or organization to which they belong, perhaps even to some institution or occupation in which they participate.

The correct answer is E.

Ethical issues are likely to arise in all kinds of social research. Burges (2005b, p. 5), for example, draws attention to the following four broad issues that can produce ethical dilemmas for all researchers:

Research sponsorship (i.e., the extent to which research funders influence a research activity, etc.).

• Research relations (i.e., questions of access, power, harm, deception, secrecy, confidentiality, and/or issues related to overt/covert research, etc.).

• Informed consent (i.e., whether consent has been obtained voluntarily, whether participants were adequately informed of the aims of research and its possible risks, or whether participants were competent to consent, etc.).

• Data dissemination (i.e., the extent to which research data can be stored, published, and/ or used by policy makers, etc.).

The correct answer is B.

The notion of reflexivity as a conceptual tool becomes crucial when dealing with the day-to-day ethical issues/dilemmas arising in qualitative research.

Because qualitative research is primarily a shared activity of knowledge construction (that is, together the researcher and the participants are engaged in an active process of producing knowledge), it requires the researcher to not only report the “facts” of his/her research, but also actively construct interpretations (e.g., “What do I know?”) while at the same time questioning how the interpretations have been made (e.g., “How do I know what I know?”) as well to request from his/her participants to reflect on their experiences. Reflexivity, then, can take many forms. Cunliffe (2003, p. 996), for example, introduces three types of reflexivity:

• Self-reflexivity as a representation of the researcher’s voice (i.e., the influence of the researcher’s values and assumptions on the process of inquiry).

• Participant reflexivity as a representation of the participant’s voice (i.e., asking participants to reflexively account for their practices).

• Radical reflexivity as a representation of a shared voice (i.e., exploring how both the “researcher as social participant” and the “social participant as researcher” create understandings from within their ongoing, shared, and dialogical practices.

The correct answer is D.

Review p. 150 'Overview of mixed research'

Greene, Caracelli, and Graham (1989) suggest that five major objectives or motivations exist for conducting MMR. The first one is ‘triangulation’, which provides validation and concurrence of results gained from various methods and designs investigating the same circumstance. ‘Complementarity’, as the second motivation, seeks for further detailing, improvement, interpretation and description of the results obtained from one method with results from the other method. The third one is ‘initiation’, which means unearthing the bias, and discrepancies that cause re-designing
of the research question. ‘Development’, the fourth motivation, includes utilizing the findings from one method to deliver clues to other method. The last motivation, ‘expansion’, seeks to expand the size of research with different methods for different
investigation factors.

The first type of research objective, exploration, comprises inductive methods to
figure out an opinion, argument and the like. In this way, it brings about intuition, hypotheses, deductions or generalization. Description, the second type, means clarifying and defining the previous experiences, relations, and the nature of the incident. One should develop or broaden a theory to achieve ‘explanation’ to find out the phenomena. Another type of research, prediction, enables the researcher to predict future events by means of previous knowledge. The fifth type of objective, influence, includes ‘the manipulation of a variable or construct’ so as to achieve an outcome

Treatment integrity presents evaluating the level of compliance of intervention.

Review Figure 6.3 at page 158.