ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights several historic studies or events that demonstrate the adverse consequences that can occur when the health and welfare of study participants are overlooked, intentionally or unintentionally. It begins with a review of research terms, and research methodology and concepts. The chapter identifies the five classic measures used to describe the health of a population, explains distal and proximal causes of illnesses, and describes nonexperimental, experimental, and quasi-experimental study designs and their relevance for health psychology research. It examines the rules regarding the ethical conduct of research involving human subjects. The chapter provides two studies in detail, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment, and explores the research methods and ethics violations in each case. One application of epidemiological research is to inform about the origins of a disease, its impact on prior generations, and its potential risk to people at present and in the near future.
