PSYCH 660 Week 2 Research Ethics and Review Boards Example

A Phone App That Tracks Teenagers' Sleep: Preparing a Study for the Institutional Review Board

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/660: Ethics and Professional Issues

Week 2 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The lab, the planned study and the review discussion are composites written for a model paper; ethical frameworks and research findings come from the sources listed.

Research with human participants carries obligations to protect people from harm, respect their choices and distribute burdens fairly. Review boards exist to check that researchers meet those obligations. This paper examines a study my lab is preparing to submit, focusing on the ethical questions a review board will raise.

The Planned Study

Our university sleep lab in Tucson plans to study whether nighttime phone use predicts shorter sleep and lower mood among high school students. Ninety students aged fourteen to seventeen would install an app that passively logs when their phone screen is unlocked and how long it stays on between nine at night and seven in the morning for four weeks. Students would also wear a wrist sleep tracker and answer a short mood survey each morning. Participants would receive gift cards totaling sixty dollars. Recruitment would occur through two public high schools.

A Framework for Ethical Research

Emanuel et al. (2000) argued that a study earns ethical standing only by clearing seven bars: it must be worth doing, be designed well enough to answer its question, recruit fairly, weigh its risks honestly against its benefits, submit to independent review, secure genuine agreement and keep treating participants with respect, including their privacy and their right to quit. They argued that the requirements are universal but must be adapted to context and that they apply to research beyond clinical trials.

Value and Validity

Adolescent sleep loss is common and linked to mood, academic and safety problems, and evidence on phone use at night is mixed, partly because studies rely on self-reports. Passive logging would provide more accurate data, giving the study scientific value. Validity requires enough participants and accurate measures; our sample size is based on a power analysis from pilot data.

Fair Selection

Recruiting from two schools risks selecting students from particular neighborhoods. We chose one school serving mostly lower-income families and one serving mostly middle-income families so that findings, and the burdens of participation, are shared. Students without smartphones are excluded by design, which we will note as a limitation rather than lend phones and change behavior.

Risks and Benefits

The main risks are privacy and psychological discomfort. The app could reveal sensitive information if it collected content, contacts or location. We designed it to record only screen on and off times, with no content, app names, messages or location, and data are encrypted and stored on university servers. A breach would reveal only timestamps. Morning mood surveys could surface distress; questions about self-harm are not included, but students who report very low mood on several days will receive a message listing support resources. Benefits to participants are modest, a sleep summary at the end, while the knowledge gained could inform guidance for families and schools.

The app records when a screen lights up, not what is on it; that design choice removes most of the privacy risk before any consent form is signed.

Lessons From a Digital Controversy

Kramer et al. (2014) reported an experiment in which a social media platform altered the emotional content of nearly 700,000 users' news feeds for a week and measured changes in their own posts, finding small effects consistent with emotional contagion. The study relied on users' agreement to the platform's data use policy rather than specific informed consent and did not undergo full review by an academic board before data collection, prompting widespread criticism and an editorial expression of concern. The episode illustrates that digital data collection can affect people without their awareness and that general terms of service are not research consent.

Our protocol therefore asks for specific consent and assent for the app, describes exactly what it records and lets participants pause logging at any time.

Consent, Assent and Parents

Because participants are minors, federal regulations require parental permission and the minor's assent. Assent forms use plain language at a seventh-grade reading level and explain that students can stop without penalty and that parents will not see their individual data. Parents receive summary information but not their child's logs, which protects teens' privacy and encourages honest participation; this arrangement will need the review board's approval.

Coercion and Incentives

Teenagers can feel pressure from adults even when no one intends it.

Payments should compensate time without pressuring participation. Sixty dollars over four weeks is modest. Recruitment will occur through letters home rather than in class to avoid pressure from teachers.

What Review Boards Do and Do Not Know

Abbott and Grady (2011) pulled together every empirical study of review boards they could find. Boards looking at the same protocol often reached different verdicts, took very different lengths of time and asked for different changes, and almost no studies had measured whether board review actually leaves participants safer. The authors urged research on how well and how consistently boards do their job.

This finding suggests that researchers should not rely on the board to catch every problem; the ethical responsibility begins with the design.

Why These Protections Exist

Modern protections grew out of abuses. In the United States, the Public Health Service study of untreated syphilis among Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, continued for decades without informed consent and withheld treatment even after penicillin became standard. Public outrage after its exposure in 1972 led to federal legislation, the national commission that wrote the Belmont principles and the regulations that require review boards. Teenagers are not the group harmed in that history, but the lesson applies: researchers convinced of their study's value can lose sight of participants' interests, and independent review exists because good intentions are not enough.

Data Retention and Future Use

Another question concerns what happens to the data after the study. Phone logs and sleep data could be valuable for future analyses, but participants should know whether their data will be kept, for how long and whether they might be shared with other researchers. Our protocol states that identified data will be destroyed three years after the study ends, that only deidentified data may be shared and that participants can ask for their data to be deleted at any time before deidentification. These choices respect participants' control over information about their nights.

Expected Questions From the Board

The board will likely ask how data are secured, whether parents can access individual logs, how distress on mood surveys will be handled, whether the schools have approved recruitment and how participants can withdraw data. Our protocol answers each.

Schools as Partners

The two high schools are partners, not just recruitment sites. Their principals reviewed the protocol, asked that no recruitment happen during class time and requested a summary of findings for families. Involving them early respects the community's interests and helps the study's results reach the people who could use them.

Conclusion

Applying a framework for ethical research to a teen sleep-tracking study identified privacy, distress and coercion risks and led to design changes, limiting data collection, strengthening security and planning assent and parental permission, before submission. Review boards add an independent check, but ethical design begins with the researcher.

References

Abbott, L., & Grady, C. (2011). A systematic review of the empirical literature evaluating IRBs: What we know and what we still need to learn. Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 6(1), 3-19. https://doi.org/10.1525/jer.2011.6.1.3

Emanuel, E. J., Wendler, D., & Grady, C. (2000). What makes clinical research ethical? JAMA, 283(20), 2701-2711. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.283.20.2701

Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788-8790. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111