Ethical Research Guidance

About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about how research ethics guidelines came about and some specific modern guidelines safeguarding participants, focusing in particular on: (i) the origin of research ethics guidelines, rooted in the 1947 Nuremberg code; (ii) some psychology experiments that have come under scrutiny for potentially breaching ethical guidelines, including Milgram’s obedience studies and the Stanford prison experiment; (iii) guidelines from the British Psychological Society (BPS), specifically the ‘do no harm’ and ‘informed consent’ principles; (iv) the principles of valid consent and the requirements of passing a mental capacity test as one of the measures of ensuring valid consent; (v) assent and consultee consent as ways of ascertaining a form of valid consent from those who are otherwise unable to provide it.

About the lecturer

Professor Nele Demeyere is head of the translational neuropsychology group in the Oxford Cognitive Neuropsychology Centre at the University of Oxford. Professor Demeyere’s research interests include cognitive impairments in stroke and dementia, as well as the mechanisms underlying visuo-spatial neglect. Some of Professor Demeyere’s recent publications include 'Domain-specific versus generalized cognitive screening in acute stroke' (2016) and 'The Oxford Cognitive Screen (OCS): validation of a stroke-specific short cognitive screening tool' (2015).