PSY6161 - Legal and ethical principles in clinical neuropsychology practice and research - 2019

Students will develop an understanding of the role of a clinical neuropsychologist and of legal and ethical principles governing professional practice and research in psychology. Students will review relevant legislation and ethical/professional standards and develop ethically and culturally sensitive psychological practices. This unit equips students with the necessary skills to design research and analyse data for their thesis, placements, and employment. After completing this unit successfully, students should be able to undertake a comprehensive program evaluation as well as a single subject design, and complete their thesis, confidently and competently with training in the application of practical research skill training. Material will be presented from a student centred learning approach with theoretical and conceptual delivery in the form of lectures, applied weekly analyses, and introductions into multilevel modelling and structural equation modelling.

1. Understand the legal and ethical principles which govern research and professional practice in psychology;
2. Appraise Australian codes of professional conduct in psychology to such issues as confidentiality, informed consent, freedom of information, intra and inter professional relationships, responsibilities, and professional conduct;
3. Define the professional role/s of the clinical neuropsychologist, and differentiate roles, responsibilities, and relationships with other health professionals;
4. Develop, maintain, and conclude appropriate professional relationships with clients;
5. Appraise the intercultural and ethnic issues that impact on psychological practice;
6. Design the main phases of the key research approaches, including program evaluations, single subject designs, experiments, quasi-experiments, and qualitative projects;
7. Accommodate the considerations and complications of these approaches, (e.g., sampling biases, spurious variables, common method variance, suppressors, non-recursive relationships, confounds, consequential validity, asymmetric transfer, mediators, moderators, stakeholder needs, economic evaluation, family wise errors, power, autocorrelation, and nonlinear dynamics);
8. Apply multivariate statistics techniques to address some of these complications, such as ANCOVA, discriminant function analysis, logistic regression analysis, multiple regression analysis, canonical correlation, and factor analysis;
9. Recognize the fundamental principles of more advanced concepts, which can then be explored through additional reading, including HLM, grounded theory, survival analyses, meta-analyses, catastrophe theory, signal detection theory, ARIMA, interim designs, Bayesian theory, and structural equation modelling;
10. Develop creative and insightful methods to maximise the utility of research; and;
11. Justify and report the procedures and techniques that were utilised

Research Workbook - Journal (10%)

Research Proposal and MUHREC application (35%)

Ethical Dilemmas Evaluations (30%)

• Peer Counselling Skills Video (Hurdle Requirement)
• Non-peer counseling video and self-evaluation (Hurdle Requirement)

End of Semester Exam (25%)

Psychology