Question

Dr. macleod is the chair of an institutional review board at a local university. he recently received a research proposal from dr. portree. dr. portree wants to conduct a study in which she tells graduating seniors that they have failed all of their classes and will not be graduating college to see how college students cope with stress. she wants to randomly choose enrolled students at the university to send her “failing notices” and she points out that she cannot have them sign a consent form because if they know that they are in a research study they might not believe that they are failing and it will ruin the results of her study. should dr. macleod allow dr. portree to conduct her study with the university students?

Answer 1

No, it is unethical to perform this type of study. There are other ways of observing the behavior of students under stress in the lab. One way might be to have them take a test and tell them they failed and compare that group to a group of students that were told they passed the test. Another method would be to observe students that actually failed their tests.