This week, we're going to delve a little deeper into ethics by considering the issue of deceptive practices in research. Start by watching the video in course content about research ethics.

Much of modern day concern about research ethics stems from the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study in which 600 African American sharecroppers, most of whom had the venereal disease syphilis, were recruited into a study by the U.S. Public Health Service that wanted to learn about the natural progression of the disease, if left untreated. In exchange for participating in the study, the subjects received free medical care and food. The study lasted for 40 years from 1932-1972. The men were never told that they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it... even though penicillin was shown to be an effective treatment by 1940, 8 years into the study, and became the standard by 1947.

The Tuskegee study ended when someone finally blew the whistle on the Public Health Service. Outrage over the Tuskegee study led to the development of the Office of Human Research Protections at the National Institutes of Health, the establishment of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) at universities and elsewhere that must review all research proposals to assure that they meet ethical standards, and the use of informed consent forms for research participants.

UMUC has an IRB that provides guidelines on research conducted under the University's auspices. One of UMUC guidelines is that we may not do research on people outside the UMUC community without IRB approval. That means that all interviews, etc. done in this class must be done with your classmates.

Here's another example of a famous research study that raised ethical concerns: In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch was interested in people's willingness to conform to the opinions of the group. He conducted a series of experiments in which he used confederates as part of his research design. Watch this in which Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo describes the Asch experiment and shows videos of the actual experiments:

Do you think that Asch's experiments were unethical? What information would you include in the informed consent form for study subjects, if you were Solomon Asch, and what would you say to them during a debriefing?

After thinking about Asch's research, now think about your own. What ethical concerns might you have with your topic?What Research Question Interests You?
After reading Eadie's discussion of communication as a field and a discipline and watching the video on the definition of research, share with us one or more communication research problem/question(s) that interest you and that might form the focus for the Research Proposal that you will be developing throughout this course. Remember that your question(s) should be the type that lend themselves to empirical research, i.e., they should involve analyzing messages and/or collecting data from people through interviews, surveys, or an experiment.

In general, communication research questions include:
After reading Eadie's discussion of communication as a field and a discipline and watching the video on the definition of research, share with us one or more communication research problem/question(s) that interest you and that might form the focus for the Research Proposal that you will be developing throughout this course. Remember that your question(s) should be the type that lend themselves to empirical research, i.e., they should involve analyzing messages and/or collecting data from people through interviews, surveys, or an experiment.

In general, communication research questions include:
In addition to sharing your questions, provide feedback to two of your classmates in how they might strengthen/improve their questions to better lend themselves to research.

Think of this exercise as developing a draft question(s)... they don't have to be perfect (yet)! I just want to get you started on the road toward your final portfolio.