Research methods

In 1939 Wendell Johnson set up ‘The Monster Study’, which involved placing 22 orphan children into two experimental groups, the ‘stutterers’ and the ‘non-stutterers’. Though it is important to note that only half of the children put into the ‘stuttering’ group actually had a stuttering problem. The non-stuttering group were given positive speech therapy, praising how well and fluent they spoke, while the other group received negative speech therapy, criticised for every single imperfection and told they were stutterers. By the end of the experiment the children who before had had no problems with their speech now did, and 3 of the 5 children who already had stutters were considerably worse.
The reasons that this experiment is deemed unethical are due to a variety of reasons. Firstly as orphan children were chosen for this study, not only did they have no one to stand up for them, but they also lacked the right to withdraw. This was mainly due to the fact that they were completely unaware of the purpose, or the true intent of the experiment. This means that the 22 children were put into this study against their will and were merely ordered to go along with it, and as they did not understand what they were a part of had no reason to question it or ask for the study to be stopped.
Also the children in the stuttering group were effectively psychologically harmed for the rest of their lives, as when Johnson discovered his hypothesis-that fluency in speech is due to development not trait, was correct, he then realised it was too late to reverse it. Therefore the children had to live with their speech impediments. Today this would be seen as a complete violation of children’s rights established in 1989. For example one concept of children’s rights is ‘A child has the right to be protected against significant harm’ and as this includes both mental and emotional harm, this Monster Study would evidently be deemed unethical.
However it is necessary to point out that