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Student project reports to be submitted in Spring Term 2008 onwards will be required to contain a Statement of Ethics, relating to the work carried out in the project. This page (and those linked to it) provides some guidance - to both students and lecturers - as to what should appear in that statement.
Under present arrangements student projects are not as a matter of course referred to the Physical Sciences Ethics Committee. Students should, of course, discuss any ethical implications with their supervisor before embarking on the project.
The basic ethical principles that should be applied in any project are:
In its most immediate interpretation, this implies that anyone taking part in the project (e.g. people testing a piece of software) must not come to any harm. For instance, they should not be put in a position of physical danger or asked to do anything which is illegal or against their best interests.
Not all projects involve testing with people, though, and yet the results of any project might be applied - for good or ill. For instance, a project which is of direct benefit to the tobacco industry might be seen to have potential harmful effects. Such a project might be said on balance to be ethically justified, though, since the smoking of tobacco is not illegal, that people are free to choose whether to smoke or not and, by extension, whether they will benefit from the results of the related project. In such a case, the Statement of Ethics is the student's opportunity to explain their own justification of the work.
Just because a project is not directly related to an industry does not mean that it will not be adopted by that industry, of course. For instance, a project on on-line marketing might be picked up by a tobacco company. Indeed, some projects may be so theoretical in nature that any application is hard to foresee. A result regarding the formal specification of software might eventually be applied to any piece of software but in such a case, the Statement of Ethics is likely to be very brief. It should be clear that in such a case, a brief statement to the effect that there are no immediate ethical considerations should be adequate for the purposes of project marking; a report which (appropriately) contains such a (brief) statement will not be marked down in comparison to one which has involved direct interaction with test participants and which therefore requires an extensive Statement of Ethics.
This again refers to the use of human participants in the project. The participants must be told in advance the purpose of the test, what they will be expected to do and any likely consequences (including side-effects). They must also be told the conditions under which they are participating. For instance, they must know whether they will be rewarded in any way for participation. If they are to be rewarded, is the level of reward contingent in any way on performance? A model introduction form (PDF) is available from the University of Glasgow. They must explicitly agree to these conditions before they commence and they must be allowed to withdraw from the experiment at any time. That they have understood the conditions and are participating willingly should be recorded by their signing a Consent Form. A model Consent Form that can be adapted to individual experiments is available on-line. A copy of the consent form should be given to the participant and it should include the student's contact details, so that the participant can get back in touch at any time. For a student project it is also appropriate to give the supervisor's contact details.
A key word is, of course, informed consent. It is important to be clear as to what the participant is told. It is sometimes necessary to withhold some information. For instance an experiment might be about how people react to unexpected interruptions in a task. They are therefore asked to undertake the task, but cannot be warned that they will be interrupted during it. Such minor deceptions are acceptable - as long as they will not conflict with the other principles (e.g. that they do not cause harm). On completion of the experiment the participant should be given the fuller picture and they will have at that point the option of requesting that their data be deleted. A simple rule-of-thumb as to what is acceptable is to ask the question whether participants would be likely to withdraw consent once they have had the complete details explained to them; if this does seem likely, then you should probably not run the experiment at all in this form. Guidelines on the design of a debriefing form are also available from the University of Glasgow's website.
Any information that you collect regarding individuals must be kept confidential. In many cases this will be achieved by its being treated and published purely statistically. If it is necessary to present individual data, then it should be done so in an anonymous form (for instance, by using a pseudonym). Any data collected must be stored securely in such a way that unauthorized access is blocked. This should be particularly true for any information which could be used to identify an individual. Note that there is a legal obligation to protect such data, and that it may be necessary to register any such data.
For further advice on data protection and relevant information refer to:
You must also beware of identifying participant in pictures. For instance, if you plan to have photographs of an experimental set-up in your project report, you must either have the explicit permission of any people in the picture for them to appear or you must make them unidentifiable in the picture.
The Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow has some excellent resources on ethics in research and student projects and there are a number of references and links to them on this page - with permission
Alistair Edwards
Email name: alistair
email domain: cs.york.ac.uk
19/11/07