Introduction to Research Assignment - Research Ethics
Objective: Develop deep understanding of research ethics in high education study. Collect and analyse ethics related information to deal with an interested research work. Have a comprehensive understanding of ethics policy used in your education institute, state and residential nation.
Task: Choose one of the two options below to write up an assay for conducting ethical research in science or social science study. Please select ONE option ONLY.
Topic - Genetic Engineering.
Option 1: Outline an interested research topic and proposed approach (what are you going to implement your research work) for your master degree study and identify the associated ethical, integrity and safety issues and risks associated with what you are proposing.
For each identified area how will these be addressed through the proposed approach to key aspects of the research and how can you substantiate that the approach you are proposing to deal with the identified risks is defensible ethically in relation to codes for research and professional conduct relevant to the field?
The material you develop in this topic will be able to be directly incorporated into your research project and/or ethics application.
Option 2: Choose one of the following research cases and write a report on the ethics issues that may happen. You need to consider both pros and cons of certain type of research. Together with the ethics issues you will consider in the chosen case, you also need to provide the response plan to solve the problems according to the ethics policies, principles, rules in VU, VIC state and Australia.
Research Cases:
- Genetic Engineering
- Nuclear Testing
- Human drug trials (pharmacological research)
- Customer expectation study on online gaming
- Browser experience satisfaction on VU website
- Animal research involving non-primates
- Animal research involving primates
- Nervous system research
- Gambler behavioural analysis
- Speech recognition
- Smartphone hacking simulation/testing in real workplace environment
- Medical history storing and sharing among public clinics via cloud computing technology
- Sleep quality study
General Criteria for both options:
You may need to consider some or more of the following aspect in your analysis if applicable:
- research design;
- recruitment and gaining informed consent;
- protection of human and/or animal rights;
- vulnerability of your proposed participants and power differential in relationships;
- data gathering approaches;
- maintaining anonymity and/or confidentiality, data integrity and management, including dealing with data privacy and security issues;
- record keeping;
- laboratory and field procedures;
- avoiding or minimizing social, psychological, legal and physical risks;
- ensuring animal welfare and biosafety etc;
- health and safety for researcher and other research assistants.
For each aspect, you also need to provide response actions, solutions for the ethical issues, integrity and safety issues and risks that may occur.
Submission format:
Report: Research Ethics on [Your chosen Topic]
Specific Tasks:
Write a report with the following structure
1. Title page to include the following:
a. Report Name
b. Student Name & Student No.
c. Unit: NIT6130 - Introduction to Research
d. Submission Due: 5pm, Friday, Week 5
2. Table of Contents
3. Introduction - briefly introduces the report purpose
4. Research Background - summarizes the chosen research with background, research purpose and expected result
5. Pros and cons of research - lists and explains the pros and cons in your chosen research with details, examples, tables, figures or your preferred style
6. Ethics Issues, integrity and safety issues and risks - analyses ALL the possible ethics issues integrity and safety issues and risks that you may have in the chosen research and your plan
7. Response plan to the issues and risks - the response actions, solutions to the issues and risks that you identified in the previous section.
8. Conclusion - briefly states your understanding, and finding from this report
9. Reference