Informed Consent

• Challenges in consent due to power dynamics in classroom research.

• Importance of obtaining valid consent in all research involving human subjects.

• Dr. Gauthier experiment on Students violates primary ethical principle in human subject research

• Disclosure, Comprehension, Competence, Voluntariness, the actual consent or decision, and the right to withdraw from the experiment.

Scientific Value

• Amaro's research was not done properly and produced unreliable results (Selection Bias).

• The study lacked value because it did not follow the right methods and consider potential risks and benefits.

• Scientific value: Importance of research & Validity of experiment results.

• “common sense approaches” were shown to provide unreliable and invalid data.

Beneficence - Human

• The risk/benefit ratio in research must prioritize maximizing the benefits for society and subjects while minimizing potential harm.

• In the case of reengineered engineers, no consent was obtained from software engineers as upper management had already made the decision to translate the code.

• Engineers face a significant risk of unemployment as they must adapt to changes over which they have no control.

• The organization is favored with benefits, but at the expense of degrading the quality of engineers' working lives.

Anonymity

• Measures are taken to ensure the anonymity of participants in an experiment, preventing anyone from being identified.

• Personal information or data that could potentially identify the subjects (such as names) is not collected.

• The data set pertaining to the subjects is designed in a way that prevents reverse tracing back to individual participants. To minimize the risk of exposing the subjects, aggregated data is reported instead of raw data.

• Subject numbers or aliases can be used to identify individual data sets.

Confidentiality

• Maintaining complete anonymity can be challenging due to possible interactions between researchers and subjects being witnessed by coworkers.

• Raw data should be securely stored, possibly under lock and key.

• Inform subjects about confidentiality limits and implications during informed consent, especially in small-scale workplace studies.

• Researchers must minimize harm to organizations by considering the potential consequences of their findings and publications.

• Ethical considerations need to be maintained to minimize harm at the organizational level, ensuring that disclosing information that may put companies at risk, such as flaws in their processes.

Beneficence—Organizational

• Researchers must minimize harm to organizations by considering the potential consequences of their findings and publications.

• Ethical considerations need to be maintained to minimize harm at the organizational level, ensuring that disclosing information that may put companies at risk, such as flaws in their processes.

• Ethical responsibility lies in offsetting these harms to the greatest extent possible.