MMI research ethics questions on protecting participants

MMI research ethics questions appear because many applicants have worked in a lab, and schools want to know what you'd do when the pressure to publish meets the people who make the research possible. The questions in this topic put you beside the person cutting the corner, and in most of them that person outranks you.

What these questions test

Three ideas run through this topic. Informed consent is a participant's agreement to take part after being told what the study involves and what it risks. Undue influence is a payment or a pressure large enough to override that judgment. Research integrity is reporting what the data show rather than what the hypothesis needs.

Interviewers test whether you treat a participant's interests as separate from the researcher's, and whether you'd act when the researcher is your supervisor. Dropping six participants to reach a publishable result and listing an author who did no work are each a lapse you could stay quiet about. Raters score what you'd say, to whom, and what you'd do if the answer doesn't hold.

How to approach them

1. Identify the participants and what they were promised: consent, anonymity and no penalty for refusing.
2. Name the pressure on the researcher, such as a grade, a publication or a deadline, and treat it as real without letting it decide the question.
3. Say whether the study as proposed respects the participants, and if it doesn't, name the change that would fix it. A smaller payment, a debrief after a deception or removing the unit numbers is a better answer than a plain no.
4. For a colleague's lapse, say what you'd ask first. A rule for excluding careless answers that was set before the data were seen is legitimate, and one invented afterward is data manipulation. If the answer doesn't hold, raise it with the person, then with a supervisor or the ethics board.
5. For a policy question, such as using data gathered without consent in the past, state both sides and take a position with a condition.
6. MMI follow-ups change one fact, such as the investigator saying the visiting professor secured the funding, so decide which facts would change your answer. A panel asks whether you'd agree, then why.

Common mistakes

• Treating "the rules don't forbid it" as the end of the analysis misses the people a permitted method still exposes.
• Accepting a researcher's label for excluded data without asking when the rule was written lets the result decide the method.
• Reporting a supervisor before asking a single question, or never reporting at all, fails the station in opposite directions.
• Treating data with names removed as anonymous ignores how few details it takes to identify a person.