Modern Ethics in Nursing Research and the Issues in Using Face Validity

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Question 1
Ethics in research ensure that nurses and other healthcare professionals practice with integrity and respect for human dignity and life. In biomedical research, research involving human beings has been conducted for years using experimental treatments. Although some of these studies have been a source of scientific breakthroughs, they have also been characterized by the unethical treatment of human beings involved in the studies (Grove & Gray, 2018). Since nurses are involved in biomedical research, history in unethical studies has defined and shaped modern ethics in nursing research. According to Boswell and Cannon (2017), unethical research can be traced back to the 1780s when Edward Jenner experimented on his son using swinepox for inoculation against smallpox and later using cowpox on other human subjects without first establishing whether these treatments were safe for use in human beings.
However, unethical research with a significant influence on ethics in modern nursing research started in the 1930s. According to Grove and Gray (2018), between the 1930s and 1980s, nurses were involved in the implementation of unethical research studies such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Nazi Medical Experiments, the Willowbrook Study, and the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital Study. These studies have shaped modern ethics in research through the development of international codes such as the Nuremberg Code, the Belmont Report in the United States, as well as professional ethics and principles that guide nursing research. As the world continues to change, ethics in nursing research also need to change to ensure integrity in research is maintained. Some additional issues that can further our understanding of ethics in research include enhancing awareness about ethical principles and creating a balance to ensure that there are scientific breakthroughs while still protecting human subjects.
Question 2
Face validity examines whether an instrument or item appears to measure what it claims to measure (Connell et al., 2018). An instrument is considered valid if it appears valid based on its face value. It is a simple approach to measuring the validity of research instruments/items. However, according to Gray and Grove (2021), face validity is a weak measure of validity because it relies on observation and different people, such as the researchers or subjects using an instrument, can have different views. For instance, what one person may consider as psychological distress may vary depending on personal experiences. Face validity only provides subjective judgment and lacks clear guidelines for judging the instrument or item (Gray & Grove, 2021). This makes face validity less reliable and accurate. When using face validity, researchers may avoid using direct statements or questions to enhance the validity of the responses. Gray and Grove (2021) suggest framing the statements or questions in such a way that participants will still perceive the instrument as measuring the construct they were told to provide information about. For instance, if the construct being measured is addiction, using statements such as “I am an addict” may force the participants to alter their responses since addiction is viewed negatively by society. Instead, the researcher can use indirect questions that point to addiction as the construct being measured but do not put the participant in a position where they feel the need to alter their responses. Also, face validity should be used in addition to content validity to increase its accuracy.
Question 3
Structured interviews involve asking all the participants the same questions (Rentala, 2019). These questions are usually predetermined and the interviewer is expected to follow a standardized interview scheduled for every participant. I think that it is possible to conduct a truly and totally pure structured interview because as Bell et al. (2016) reveal, structured interviews limit unscripted commentary during the interview to avoid bias. This allows the interviewer to guide the interview process and ensure that participants only provide the required answers. Also, Rentala (2019) indicates that it is possible to avoid unnecessary conversations because the interview is focused only on scripted questions. In most cases, questions in structured interviews are close-ended, which leaves no room for participants to expound on their responses. For instance, the interviewer may require participants to answer the questions using terms such as strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree.
When an interviewer is dealing with a participant who tends to give more information than the questions require, the interviewer can respectfully ask the participant to stick to the provided choices for responses. In fact, one of the disadvantages of structured interviews is that they do not give participants room to expound their responses (Rentala, 2019) or engage in unscripted interactions with the interviewer...