Case Bank
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Conformity replication
Research EthicsIRB ReviewMinimal RiskRisk/Benefit AssessmentSocial - Behavioural and Educational ResearchA student wishes to replicate Milgram’s famous conformity study, with a slight modification. Subjects will be informed they and another volunteer are participating in a teaching intervention test. Subjects are told that they will be a “tester” and other volunteer will be a “learner” given a series of questions, and the tester are to press a button to administer an electric shock whenever the learner gets a question wrong. Shocks escalate in strength as more questions are answered incorrectly. Unbeknownst to the tester, the learners are actors; no shocks are actually delivered, though the learner will call out in pain as if they have been shocked. As the testing progresses, the learner will progressively give incorrect answers as shocks escalate. When the tester suggests that the learner has had enough, a study coordinator will instruct the tester to continue and assure them that everything is fine. The study will cease […]
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Health information study
A researcher wishes to conduct a retrospective observational study on the health records of patients at a particular hospital who recently underwent a cardiovascular surgery in the past year. The researcher would be looking for correlations between long-term complications arising from the surgery and an array of risk factors indicated in the patients’ charts – weight, smoking habits, reported exercise, hypertension levels, etc. – with the goal of using the results to tailor follow-up care based on personalized risk factors. The records of all 822 patients who underwent cardiovascular surgery at that hospital in the past year would be accessed in the course of the study. The researcher requests a waiver of consent from her IRB, on the grounds that the risk is minimal (data will be kept secure within the hospital’s servers) and the study would be impracticable without the waiver (It may be difficult to contact all 822 […]
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Online Bullying
Research EthicsIRB ReviewMinimal RiskRisk/Benefit AssessmentSocial - Behavioural and Educational ResearchIn order to better understand online bullying triggers, a group of researchers will recruit secondary school students who are social media users. Researchers will first approach students at school with a questionnaire concerning online harassment on social media sites. Among those who report at least one instance of online harassment in the past year (and with further permission of their parents) researchers will invite them to participate in more in-depth study. In this more in-depth phase, researchers will be given access to view the student’s social media platform on which the harassment occurred. The researchers will study the initial circumstances surrounding the harassment, in order to ascertain the proximate causes of such harassment. Developed for use at an October 2016 CENTRES workshop on the Social, Behavioural and Educational Research. © 2016 National University of Singapore. All rights Reserved. Questions for Discussion What are the main forms of subject […]