An environmental psychologist investigated the relationship between personal exposure to ambient traffic noise and levels of physiological stress. She recruited a sample of 35 urban residents using a volunteer sampling method.
Each participant wore a portable decibel meter for 5 consecutive days to record their average daily noise exposure. At the end of the 5 days, their physiological stress was measured by taking a salivary cortisol sample immediately after they completed a challenging high-pressure cognitive task in a laboratory setting.
Outline how the ethical consideration of informed consent could have been dealt with in this study.
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.