In terms of creating an unethical research proposal, I found myself to be quite a natural at being unethical. It seems easier to be evil and keniving, than being that of an upstanding and ethical researcher. In a group, we chose to look at a study of how adolescent youths would act when given an anonymous profile with which they could interact on social websites. Would they appear similar to thier real world persona? Would they be unruly and harsh towards thier peers? Would we do everything in our power to prove what we wanted too (be it ethical or not)? We went through the
National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2007) and tryed to go against all ethical behaviour as follows:
- Merit and integrity--We decided that, as perfectly capable yet unexperienced researchers, we would gain access to inappropriate facilities such as a local internet cafe or a McDonalds free wi-fi zone, and begin to research the youths as we saw fit.
- Justice--Our recruitment process was simple. We would chose the most unruly and misbehaved teens we could get our evil hands on, in an effort to obtain interesting results.
- Procedural justice--Our results would be kept confidential and we would choose to only publish the data and findings we thought would strengthen our argument. Our subjects would surely not be informed on the real purpose of our study.
- Respect--We would have little to no regard for the welfare of our subjects as well of any other people that may be abused or persecuted during our study. Cultural sensitivity would be something that stood in our way rendering it unneccessary. We would promise our subjects a monetary reward with no intention of ever paying them.
- Avoid risk of harm--humiliation, harm to reputation, pain and injury,embarrassment, guilt, fear, financial loss was not our issue but that of our subjects. It's out of our hands (though we'd push them to take risks)
- Consent--We would not tell the minors' parent's and we would coherse them to dable in dangerous liasons. They would not be allowed to pull out of our study of course.
- Attribution and honesty-- We thought it would only be fair to steal some of the research of others somewhere along the way. We wouldn't reference them though. If they wrote it they obviously want someone else to use it....and take credit for it.
Ahhhh...that was a great study! Lots of valuble information came from that....Meet Unethical Edward next week when we take on some other unsespecting group and treat them like animals...
