A researcher investigates online coping strategies for anxiety by covertly collecting and analyzing posts from a publicly accessible internet discussion forum without obtaining consent from the forum members.
According to British Psychological Society (BPS) ethical guidelines, what is the primary ethical concern with this research design?
The breach of the participants' expectation of privacy, as individuals sharing sensitive personal experiences online often do not anticipate their communications being analyzed for research purposes.
The absolute violation of confidentiality, because BPS guidelines dictate that public forum usernames can never be legally or practically anonymized in published reports.
The direct psychological distress caused to the participants during the active extraction of data, which violates the principle of protection from harm.
The lack of internal validity, because covert online observation prevents the researcher from verifying the clinical diagnoses of the forum members.
276 exam-style questions on OCR A Level Psychology Debates, covering Nature/nurture, Freewill/determinism, Reductionism/holism, Individual/situational explanations, Usefulness of research, Ethical considerations, Conducting socially sensitive research, and Psychology as a science. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.