Week 3
Instructions:
Procedures, Limitations, Ethical Considerations, and Informed Consent
In week 3, you will be adding the procedures, limitations, and the ethical considerations sections to your methodology. In addition to this, you will fill out an informed consent form. Please pay close attention to the language used to protect the participants. Use the outline below to ensure you are not missing any important or relevant information in these sections.
Procedures –
Step by step, how will you collect the data for your study?
Recruitment – Where and how are you going to get your sample? (don’t recruit people you know)
Data collection – Step by step, how are you going to collect your data?
Data analysis– You should be able to get insight on how you can analyze your data through the literature. This is not a huge focus since we are not spending a lot of time on analysis.
Limitations of the study –
Confounding variables- list at least 2 possible confounding variables that may need to be controlled for in your experiment
Threats to validity- describe at least one threat to validity (usually, this is some sort of limit to the type of research being conducted)
Any additional limitations that you can think of (remember, this could be hypothetical)
Ethical considerations –
What possible ethical issues need to be considered? (there is always something, never say there are no ethical issues)
Make sure you discuss informed consent, right to privacy, and the voluntary nature of research. Any possible risks should also be covered here.
State the importance of the Internal Review Board (IRB) and how you will be seeking approval from the IRB before conducting any data collection.
If you conduct research on vulnerable populations like prisoners or children, be sure to do some additional research to see how best to protect them. Address that here as well.
