Teaching research ethics through reality TV

Given the success and popularity of reality TV, particularly with young audiences, we felt there was an opportunity to use this material in teaching. There is a growing literature demonstrating that material from popular TV can be an effective component of undergraduate teaching, including psychology. The idea was to show students a brief extract from a reality TV programme, to ask them to discuss the ethical issues they think it raises, and then to give them opportunities to apply their thinking to psychological research. The students evaluated these sessions very positively. The students commented that they found this a very engaging way of learning about research ethics, and we have since used this material in teaching research ethics to our psychology undergraduates as part of their Research Methods course. The findings from both our qualitative and quantitative analyses give support to the view that students can indeed benefit from using TV material. We intend to continue using this material in our teaching and to monitor its success.