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Case Study

Based on the APA Ethics Code guidelines for minimizing deception, how should the researcher decide whether to use the confederate design or the vignette design, and why?

Case context: A researcher wants to study how college students react to perceived authority figures. The proposed design involves a confederate posing as a campus police officer to confront participants about a minor rule violation. However, a colleague suggests that the same research question could be answered by having participants read a vignette about the scenario and asking them how they would react, which would avoid deceiving the participants.

Question: Based on the APA Ethics Code guidelines for minimizing deception, how should the researcher decide whether to use the confederate design or the vignette design, and why?

Sample answer: The researcher should carefully evaluate if the active deception (using the confederate) is truly necessary. According to the APA Ethics Code, deception is ethically acceptable only if there is no alternative way to answer the research question. Since the colleague proposed a nondeceptive alternative (the vignette), the researcher must replace the deceptive method with the nondeceptive one unless they can justify that the vignette design cannot adequately answer the research question.

Key points:

  • The researcher must evaluate if the active deception is truly necessary.
  • Deception is only acceptable if there is no alternative way to answer the research question.
  • The researcher should replace the deceptive method with the nondeceptive alternative if possible.

Rubric: Full credit is awarded for correctly explaining that the researcher must evaluate the necessity of the deception and should choose the nondeceptive alternative if it can effectively answer the research question, as dictated by the APA Ethics Code.

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Updated 2026-05-27

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Research Methods in Psychology - 4th American Edition @ KPU

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