Research Ethics
Types of Research Articles
Quantitative Research Designs and Bias
Statistics
Misc.
100
This principle (from the Belmont Report) regarding the treatment of participants in research says research should DO NO HARM (meaning physical and psychological harm).
What is Beneficence?
100
This type of article reports on a study focusing on African Americans experiences of health care and what quality health care means to them. In-depth interviews and focus groups are conducted with African American patients at a public hospital in San Francisco.
What is a qualitative research article?
100
During a study testing the effect of a drug abuse intervention on high school students' drug use, a state initiative to legalize marijuana is passed. This threat to internal validity is called:
What is history?
100
This is what the P in p-value stands for (bonus if you also explain what it means in the context of a research study)
What is Probability?
100
A researcher strongly believes that animal companions extend the life of women living with ovarian cancer by at least a year. She interviews family members of women with ovarian cancer and introduces the study and asks questions in a way that conveys her own belief in the value of having a dog or a cat in the home. This bias is...
What is researcher bias?
200
This is a harm that occurs when a researcher fails to keep study records linking participant identifiers (random #s) to their names in a locked cabinet, as promised in the study protocol.
What is loss of confidentiality?
200
This article type examined 50 research studies on juvenile justice interventions and found that 45 of them focused on behavioral change rather than systems change.
What is a literature review?
200
In this design (what type), a researcher sets out to examine whether a social support intervention reduces depression among seniors living in low-income housing. Residents living in 1 assisted living facility get the intervention, and are compared to those living in another facility across town. Residents are surveyed before and after the intervention.
What is a quasi-experimental study?
200
A researcher sets out to examine whether a social support intervention reduces depression among seniors living in low-income housing. Residents living in 1 assisted living facility get the intervention, and are compared to those living in another facility across town. What type of statistics would you use to compare both of these groups on their mental health?
What are inferential statistics?
200
A study seeking to better understand women's experiences of living with ovarian cancer recruits participants through volunteers responding to fliers in local hospital oncology centers and invitations to cancer support groups. This sampling method is:
What is a purposive sampling method?
300
This ethical concern happens when researchers offer low-income uninsured migrant farmworkers free health care if they participate in a study testing a new vaccine against Whooping Cough.
What is coercion?
300
Because of the small samples and the emphasis on local context, external validity is usually a limitation reported in this type of research article.
What is a qualitative research article?
300
Researchers have found that physical activity (PA) and depression are highly correlated. A researcher sets out to examine the relationship between PA and depression among adolescents in California high schools. A survey is conducted in the Fall of 2012, and finds that adolescents who are less physically active have higher rates of depression than more active adolescents. What is a condition of causality that this study fails to meet?
What is "temporal precedence"? (i.e., a lack of PA must come before an increase in depression) Could also fail to address the 3rd variable problem (i.e., the relationship between PA and depression could be explained by another factor)
300
A study testing a social support intervention finds that seniors who receive the intervention are significantly less likely to report depressive symptoms after the intervention than are seniors who do not receive the intervention. The p-value (what is it?) tells us that there is less than a 1 in 20 probability that the finding is due to chance.
What is a p-value of less than .05?
300
This study seeks to understand the impact of a tax on soda in Richmond, CA on purchasing behaviors and soda consumption among Richmond youth. Since it is impossible to randomly assign people to a policy like this, what would be the next most appropriate design for this study?
What is a Quasi-Experimental Design?
400
When someone is invited to participate in a research study, this document (which someone must sign) must detail everything that will happen to them if they agree to participate, including naming any risks and benefits of participation.
What is informed consent?
400
This article (what type?), extracting data from 5000 medical records for patients seeking attention for a variety of illnesses, finds that women are more likely to report experiencing severe pain than are men with the same ailments. This findings is significant (p<.001).
What is a quantitative research article?
400
During a study testing the effect of a drug abuse intervention on drug use among high school students in the SF Bay Area, an initiative to legalize marijuana in San Francisco is passed. The best design for minimizing this as a threat to the study's validity is (bonus point for explaining why):
What is a Randomized Controlled Trial (or a true experiment)?
400
The closer a p-value is to this number, the more evidence we have against the null hypothesis.
What is zero?
400
In a qualitative study of the effect of animal companions on quality of life among women with ovarian cancer, one participant says, "Milky Way (her cat) comes and puts her paws on my chest every night." The researcher interprets this as a sign of affection. However, the woman later says that her cat does this whenever she wants to be fed. This threat to internal validity is called:
What is an "error of interpretation"?
500
This Belmont Report Principle states that research participants must be autonomous, able to make their own decisions (or if they are not able to, they need special protection).
What is Respect for persons?
500
This quantitative research article describes an approach (what is it?) to research where community representatives partnered with researchers throughout all stages of the research, identifying questions of interest to the community, collaboratively collecting and analyzing data, and disseminating data to the community and the peer review process.
What is Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR)?
500
This type of study design seeks to understand the nature of a problem, such as trying to understand risk factors for Cholera in Haiti, or barriers to vaccinating children against the Whooping Cough in California.
What is a non-experimental design?
500
This statistic is valuable because it provides us with a range of values for a variable of interest (such as the effect of an intervention) that is likely to include the true value of teh variable in the general population.
What is a confidence interval?
500
This is the process of defining a variable in the context of your study, and identifying how best to measure that variable.
What is operationalization?
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