Laura Chouette on Unsplash This study aims to measure the mental, educational and physiological effects of sleep deprivation on adolescents and means of alleviating those effects. Participants are aged 13–18, and will spend 15 days sequestered in a study facility under the supervision of the study team. They may be in contact with parents and others via telephone and internet, but leaving the premises will constitute withdrawal from the study. Participants will be randomly assigned either a normal sleep regimen or a sleep-deprived regimen. Throughout the day and night, they will wear a movement-sensitive wristband to measure physical activity and sleep patterns. On 4 nights, sleep will be monitored via electrodes placed on their body. During the day, participants will be given regular meals (food other than that provided by researchers is not permitted), attend science education activities and undergo a battery of psychological tests intended to measure the effects […]

A business school professor with a sizeable research budget would like to study attitudes of corporate leaders concerning effective leadership strategies that have allowed their companies to thrive. A corporate leadership training firm has agreed to forward the study invitation to its clients. Participants are to fill out an online questionnaire that lasts about 45 minutes, including details about their company’s size, revenue and net profits, as well as open-ended questions about successful business strategies. Given the value of corporate leaders’ time and the need to attract sufficient participants, the professor proposes to pay participants $200. 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 Can the payment be considered undue inducement? Are there any concerns about the recruitment method? Would it make a difference if the subjects were, instead, low-income […]

A 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 […]

A professor is interested in the extent to which students’ medical issues affect their academic ability. He wants to recruit students at his college to fill in a questionnaire concerning any major health issues they have had in the past year, including dates and purpose of non-routine visits to the college’s health services. He also will ask for their permission to access their academic records from the same period, in order to measure whether there is a strong causal relationship between certain health issues and how well a student does in class. He will use the findings to generate recommendations concerning how professors may want to be sensitive in teaching and assessing students with those health issues highly correlated with poor performance. The researcher requests of his IRB a waiver of the requirement for consent. While the study uses identifiable health information, the researcher argues that the study is observational […]

The purpose of the study is to determine whether intensive, short term reflex training methods on the performance of proficient amateur players of fast paced action online video games (based on actions per minute) can be enhanced to the level of professional players. Actions per minute (APM) is a measurement of a player’s load handling capacity and is one of the metrics for judging player skill. A casual player can hit 50 APM; an experienced player, 75 APM; a proficient player 150 APM; and professional players can get up to 500–600 APM.   A sample of 40 secondary school students who are proficient players (150 APM) of a fast paced action online video game are randomly assigned to two groups. 20 students will be assigned to the intensive, short term training group and 20 students to the control group. The students in the training group will follow a daily one-hour […]

In 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 […]