Research ethics

I'm your host, Dr. Claire O'Connell, and in this series, we explore how research and evidence can shape better policies for the benefit of service users, of communities, and of society at large.

So ethics, there's a lot to unpack, particularly as ethics increasingly sits at the intersection of research ethics, bioethics, clinical practice, AI governance, data protection, and public trust.

And joining us today is an expert panel who can shine a light on at least some of these issues, and they are Professor Andrew Green, Professor of Medical Genetics at University College Dublin, and a consultant clinical geneticist at Children's Health Ireland.

Andrew has previously chaired the research ethics committees at both UCD and Our Lady's Children Hospital Crumlin, and he has contributed to national bioethics policy on the Irish Council for Bioethics and the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction.

Andrew's also a member of one of, uh, our four National Research Ethics committees for clinical trials in Ireland.

We also have Simone Walsh.

Simone is chair of the Irish Research Nurses and Midwives Network, and she is All-Island PPI Ignite program manager.

Simone is also a member of the National Research Ethics Committee for Medical Devices, and with a background in nursing, in public health, research governance, and medical devices, Simone has a lot of experience in the ethical and regulatory oversight of clinical research.

Hello and welcome to Psych Ready, your go-to revision podcast for OCR GCSE Psychology.

I'm your tutor for today, and in this episode we're diving deep into one of the most important and most frequently examined topics on the specification, ethics in research.

Whether you're revising for your first mock or your final exam, this episode will give you everything you need to pick up marks with confidence.

So grab your revision notes, get comfortable, and let's get started.

Ethics in research is essentially the set of rules and guidelines that psychologists must follow to protect the people who take part in their studies.

These guidelines are set by the British Psychological Society or the BPS, and they exist because throughout history, some psychological research caused real harm to participants.

Think about Milgram's obedience study in nineteen sixty-three where participants were led to believe they were delivering electric shocks to another person, or Watson and Rayner's Little Albert study in nineteen twenty where a baby was deliberately made to fear a white rat.

An important outgrowth of this infamous study is the National Research Act, which was signed into law in 1974.

This act was a critical force in protecting the rights of study participants and shaping research ethics in the United States.

It created the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which identified basic principles of research and ways to ensure that those principles were followed.

The Commission's recommendations required researchers to always get informed consent from all of their study participants.