Additional safeguards that may be included in a social and behavioral study may include

Question:- Additional safeguards that may be included in a social and behavioral study may include

Answer:

The correct answer for additional safeguards that may be included in a social and behavioural study is: Whenever possible, scrub the data to eliminate all possible clear references to the patient as soon as possible.

This safeguard is imperative in social and behavioural research to ensure that the participant’s identity and data are kept a secret. In such studies, one ends up acquiring personal data that if connected to the rightful owners, could be damaging or embarrassing to the subjects. To avoid compromising the participant’s identity, it is essential to strip off the nominal variables like name, address, and social security numbers as early as data collection as possible to minimize the risk of identification.

For instance, in a study on workplace satisfaction, instead of cross-referencing the employee’s names with the surveys they filled in, researchers may have numbers with the respective responses. The master list that is being used to link the codes to the names would be stored safely and not shared with any of the data and once the analysis is done, it would be adequately discarded. The real identification of participants may also be protected during a longitudinal study of family functioning by using pseudonyms in the conducted field notes and transcripts; however, any information linking the code to the actual identities of participants can be saved in an encrypted format. This practice enables the data to be sorted and organised in the researcher’s analysis without compromising the individual identity. It is particularly crucial in research involving subjects that may provoke adverse reactions from other people, such as psychological disorders, sexual orientation, or criminal activities, where subjects’ identities must be kept anonymous. By emphasizing data anonymization, researchers begin to gain participants’ trust and may receive more truthful answers and thus get less bias and better results from investigations or experiments, while meeting their ethical responsibility to ensure that the people helping the scientific community do not suffer any adverse consequences of their actions.