Respond to two of your classmates postings. In 5+ sentences, share how their posting reinforces your understanding of the case study or an ethical principle. Provide constructive, thoughtful feedback designed to build an engaging dialog. To achieve this, you can expand upon the discussion through the sharing of addition of websites, articles, interactive tutorials, or videos.
1. Wendell Johnson was a psychologist that is known as a pioneer in the field of speech pathology. He suffered from severe stuttering from an early age, despite the stuttering he did very well in school. He was president and valedictorian of his senior class. His issues with stuttering led him to study speech, he wanted to know what caused a person to stutter. His extensive research throughout his lifetime led him to theorize that stuttering bred from psychosocial issues, not physical or emotional ones. Johnson believed that overly anxious parents were the cause of a childs speech impediment. This theory led to Tudors (1939) thesis, titled An Experimental Study of the Effect of Evaluative Labeling on Speech Fluency. Tudor and Johnson investigated the influence of applying the labels stuttering and normal speaker to children on the frequency of disfluencies in normal speakers and those who already stutter.
In the late 1930s, Johnson approved a research design referred to as the monster study. A graduate student of his, Mary Tudor, used a local orphanage for a stuttering experiment. Mary Tudor did not have permission or consent to work with these children. While conducting the experiment, Tudor led children to believe that they had a stuttering problem, when in fact, they did not. Children that did stutter were led to believe that they did not. In essence, the experiment was designed to induce a stutter in normal, well-spoken children. Tudor subjected half of the children to criticism to make them self-conscious about their speech, eventually driving most of them to stutter. Six of 22 children who were normally fluent, received negative feedback on their speech.
Tudor concluded that her findings supported the hypothesis that evaluative labeling can influence behavior (Tudor 1939). A few months after the conclusion of the experiment, the orphanage contacted Tudor to voice their concerns about the childrens worsening speech. Feeling remorseful, Tudor returned to the orphanage and attempted to use positive therapy to improve their speech. This experiment was not successful, In fact, Johnson did not include it in his body of work. Lawsuits were later filed. They claimed that this study had a permanent negative psychological effect on the children that participated.
Informed consent or the lack of informed consent is a huge ethical issue in this case. The children were exploited because they lived in an orphanage, were poor, and were not being raised with their biological parents. The teachers and administrators of the orphanage were also misled about the purpose of the study. Informed consent means that a patients right to autonomy is protected. It is of the utmost importance for the participant to know of any physical harm or discomfort, any invasion of privacy, as well as any threat to dignity. In Tudors study, the children were not aware that they were being lied to and were led to believe that they had a medical condition. The participants were underage, therefore were not at an age to consent. In fact, the children were never told they had been involved in a study, until it was revealed by a newspaper over 60 years later. This study led some children to develop a stutter and some became afraid to speak up in social settings. The children were harmed psychologically in this study. This study violated basic human rights because it was conducted without the knowledge, consent, or informed consent of the underage participants. The experiment was cruel and misleading. Due to the ethical misconduct, it is my belief that this study would not be approved by an IRB today.
Tudor, M. (1939). An experimental study of the effect of evaluative labeling on speech fluency. Unpublished masters thesis, University of Iowa.
2. The ethical guidelines and considerations play a vital role in making the researchers depict high ethicality levels in their studies. Therefore, every researcher’s ultimate responsibility is to understand the ethical requirements and apply them to their studies. The key ethical considerations include informed consent, right to privacy, confidentiality, anonymity, voluntary participation, freedom to withdraw, protection from harm, and debriefing. Based on the Raynolds 2003 study analysis, it is evident that the researchers violated numerous ethical principles. Firstly, the researcher violates the ethical principle of informed consent because none of the participants were told about the research’s intent (Reynolds, 2003). In this case, the participants are made to participate in a study with limited knowledge. Mary Tudor ought to inform the participants about the study’s purpose and how it will impact their lives.
Informed consent allows the participants to understand what the study is all about and either accept or refuse to participate in the study. Another ethical principle violated by the researcher is voluntary participation. Here, Mary Tudor coerces the participants to undertake the study by cheating them that they would receive speech therapy. It is unethical for the researchers to coerce the participants to undertake the study. However, they should do it voluntarily. It is important to note that voluntary participation in a study enables the participants to appreciate their roles in achieving the study’s goals and objectives. The chosen study would not be approved by the IRB today. The IRB has well-established ethical codes that every researcher must adhere to. The key ethical codes include voluntary informed consent, human experiments should be designed and based upon prior animal experiments, and only qualified scientists should conduct experiments (Kim, 2012). In this case, the researcher does not adhere to the informed consent and voluntary participation requirements, thus violate the IRB requirements. A lack of effective ethical guidelines framework for research enabled the research to be tolerated.
References
Kim, O, W (2012). Institutional Review Board (IRB) and ethical issues in Clinical Research. Korean Journal of Anaesthesiology. Retrieved from http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
Reynolds, G. (2003, March 16). The stuttering doctor’s monster study. New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/magazine/the-stuttering-doctor-s-monster-study.html?pagewanted=all
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