Final report

PSY 223 Milestone One Worksheet

Introduction

When a child is born they go through various stages of development, crawling is one of the most significant development in a child, and this is because it helps in the development and enhancement of other aspects such as sensory skills, cognitive development and coordination in the children. Children normally start crawling between 6 and 12 months however there are special cases where the children will start crawling very late compared to the other children. In the selected data set, there is an attempt to investigate the relationship between the age at which a child starts to crawl and their body temperature. The data set shows a set of the different temperatures recorded over the twelve months. The data set, which I selected, is the scenario 1 on the Child and Adolescent Development and the main reason for selecting the data set is how interesting it is to me; it also my concentration. The development of children is important as it helps parents understand their children better.

2. Describe the involved parties in the data set presented and the question that you can answer by the data.

The parties that are involved in the data set are children who are aged above 6 months and the temperatures of the children together with the age in weeks when the children start crawling. The children are the only participants represented in the data set and it focuses on the development of the children considering the impact of the seasonal temperatures on the crawling. Crawling is an important aspect in children and this is because it indicates that a child can attain independent movement and for that, reason parents look forward to seeing the children crawl. The parents are also a party involved since the recording of the temperatures cannot be done without the consent of the parents.

Discuss why the study exemplifies one that agrees with The American Psychological Association’s (APA) Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct.

The study abides by the APA ethical principles. One of the ethical principles provides that the psychologists should ensure that there are necessary steps taken to ensure that they do not harm the participants in any way. The participants had their temperature measured 6 months after birth, the process of measuring the temperatures of the infants is not harmful and for that reason, the study is ethical (Drogin, 2019). Also, the research study ensures that there is no conflict of interest of the researchers. In the study, the researchers do not stand to gain anything other than answers to their research question. Conflict of interest is bad, as it would mean that researchers use the information gained for their personal gain. Additionally, the psychologists in the research ensured that they do not bring up any activities where they knew that their personal problems would interfere with their ability to perform competently during the research.

Another very important aspect and principle that has been observed is the privacy and confidentiality principle. Psychologists must ensure that the personal data and information about their participants is protected and that the information is not shared to third parties or used for any personal gains. In the data set provided there is no personal information provided about the children or their families (Young, 2017). No one can tell that a particular child was a participant in the research and this helps prevent the data from being used by third parties that might have malicious reasons. From the data set, we can see that competent individuals that have the needed skills and qualifications to conduct a research of this manner prepared it.

Discuss ethical issues that might arise when you are analyzing and reporting statistical results.

Various ethical issues that can arise during data analysis and reporting. One, the issue of privacy and confidentiality can come up when the personal data of the children or families is exposed or included in the reports without the consent of the participants. Another issue that can come up is discrimination where some of the participants are treated in a bad way just because of their personal characteristics such as their age, gender, race or ethnicity. All the participants need to be treated equally with no special treatment being given to any particular individuals. Also dishonesty is an ethical issue which can come up in data reporting (Firmin et al., 2018). Sometimes the researcher might want to prove a relationship is existent between the age of crawling and the temperatures. This could push a researcher to manipulate the data to portray a relationship that is false to help prove their hypothesis is true.

Describe one way in which you will ensure your reporting of results will align with the APA ethics code.

There are many ways to ensure data reporting aligns with APA ethics code and one of them is ensuring that the data reported is original. In conducting research, sometimes one might be tempted to copy paste information from existing data sets online, in journals and in books. This is against the APA ethics code and is dishonesty. I will use research to help me understand the behavior in the data set but I will not copy paste the data from any sources. Original work is a learning opportunity to help see whether you have understood various concepts.

References

Drogin, E. Y. (2019). Ethics codes and how they are enforced.

Firmin, M. W., DeWitt, K., Smith, L. A., Ellis, H. M., & Tiffan, N. M. (2018). Academic

Differences Between the NASP and APA Ethical Codes. Education, 139(2), 74-80.

Young, G. (2017). Revising the APA ethics code. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International

Publishing.