Assisted Suicides - Research Proposal Example

? Assisted Suicides Lecturer Introduction Assisted suicide is the voluntary termination of one’s own life by administration of substances by a physician thereby terminating one’s life. A terminally ill patient who is suffering from incurable diseases for a long time may require a doctor to end his/her life a condition referred to as euthanasia. The difference between assisted suicide and euthanasia is that the former occurs at the patience discretion while the latter occurs at the physician’s judgment. Assisted suicide is a controversial issue from moral dimension, religious dimension and legal dimension and thus it is a matter of great concern. There are several debates by politicians, psychologists and doctors on how to handle this issue without causing much negative publicity. This lingering question is the motive behind this research that wants to establish the motive behind assisted suicide and its impact to the parties concerned. Research topic Assisted suicides Research question: Should physician-assisted suicides be made legal globally? What are the social implications of this practice? Justification of research question This question has gained considerable attention in recent years with strong pressure groups and activists for and against it. It challenges the moral framework of our society and affects the sentimental beliefs of masses; however, it is indispensable to permit this practice officially, giving rights to everyone to decide themselves for their own lives. Patients engaged in deadly diseases and their families who have to live through the fact every day that their loved ones are in pain can only understand the grave realities behind these decisions. They can only pray for the miseries of their close ones to end as soon as possible. At this stage, a voluntary painless end to life is much more preferable for them than leading a hopeless, agonizing and bedridden life: this is where physician-assisted suicide plays its essential role (Strohm, 2013). In a research carried out where patients suffering from terminal illnesses were surveyed, 73% of them approved the fact that they should have a right to practice assisted suicide. Such shocking figures, in favor of legalizing it, clearly indicate how this matter needs to be considered at national and global level and be resolved promptly. Citizens in the U.S. have also been raising voices recently in support of this agenda. Two-third of Michigan’s residents, including physicians and doctors, suggested that physician-assisted suicides should be made legal. It should be noted that every person has a right to have personal choices about his own life, which should be respected and entertained instead of stifling him or her through unfair legal systems (Materstvedt et al, 2003). With such increasing public awareness in favor of this propaganda and millions of cases each year in this regard, it is high time that authorities must take notice of this case, conduct careful and critical assessment and reach an optimal decision (Sarah, 2010). Conceptualization of Key Concepts Key concepts represent attributes and variables that must be carefully considered during research since they affect the planned outcome and procedures deployed to measure them (Babbie, 2012). There are certain key concepts involved in this research, which must be addressed through various measures and tools. Identification and assessment of key concepts especially abstract ones enable the development of appropriate measurement techniques and fruitful results of study. The first concept is related to the religious and political views of population being targeted for research tools. A person with rigid political views will be relatively more inflexible and invulnerable to changes; they would prefer stability in social environment over time. Religion also restricts people from accepting any rules and practices, which contradict with their religious principles. Next concept involves the environmental and customary influences on people living in a certain territory. Their exposure to rituals and norms will shape their mindset to be either liberal or conservative towards acceptance of assisted suicides and right of people to opt for these practices for themselves. The final major concept includes education level of population selected for the research. Education sets the level of prejudice demonstrated by a person towards modern medical and technological advancements. Uneducated classes, especially living in rural areas, would not be willingly open to such an outrageous idea. Equal rights and liberty of opinion are direct products of level of education (Thomas, 2009). Operationalization of key concepts In order to address concepts of social research, indicators and measures must be established which needs an imaginative approach by researcher as there is no one perfect way to achieve the planned outcomes. Operationalization refers to conversion of concepts into a quantifiable form, which can be later measured by identifying probability of occurrence of each variable. The procedures employed would include conducting thorough surveys, interviews and preparing appropriate questionnaires to be filled by participants in order to collect maximum and relevant social demographic metrics. Measuring the concepts shall not be an easy task since they cannot be readily quantified. Data shall be categorized by age, sex and other attributes to identify presumptive patterns and under correlation between each variable and view towards legalization of assisted suicides. Questionnaires shall include inquiries regarding the religion being followed, level of education attained and how they would decide if one of their close ones faced the same situation. Facial expressions, body language, and gestures shall be observed to ensure no dishonest opinions are recorded. The strength of stance must be noted since many participants may be neutral or confused. In such cases, relevant arguments must be sold to them in hope to pursue them to agree to legalization of assisted suicides. Correspondence shall be established with government authorities, inquiring justifications for not legalizing the said practice and strong arguments shall be presented to defend our position. Data collection This section outlines the methodology that will be used to attain the objectives of the study. It presents the research design, the location of the study, the population of the study, sampling procedures, instrumentation and validity and reliability of the instrument. The research design for this study is survey design, this is because we intend to involve many people in this research and the data will be more representative. This method is also relatively cheap and more convenient as questionnaires can even be sent through email or can easily be printed. There is also the possibility of collecting data all over the world therefore its more representative than other methods. The shortcoming of survey is that it is less ideal for controversial issues due to difficulty in recalling the information (Sincero, 2012). Since they are always standardized, surveys may be asking inappropriate questions thereby leading to inadequate research. Probability sampling shall be used to represent the population since they are most valid and produce credible results. The sampling design to be used will be random sample to help avoid bias during data collection and thus increases accuracy. In order to control the possible sources of bias, it is prudent to distribute the questionnaires randomly among all people in the study with proper regards to age and gender. The target population for this study consists of patients, politicians, religious leaders and general population. Specifically, this study will target all the physicians and patients engaged in since they are in a position to offer the greatest solution to this research. Psychologist will also be questioned to hear their response in this issue. Proposed Observation Method The preliminary stage of the study will be identification of the total number of suicide-assisted suicide cases reported, this is vital for the development of sampling frame for use in this study. People will then be identified as physicians, patients, religious leaders and the public. Sampling technique will be used to select the respondents from the three categories. Stratified sampling guarantees enclosure, in the group sample, which if not would be omitted completely by other sampling methods because of their small numbers in the population. Stratification will be based on administrative divisions; moreover, Simple random sampling technique will be used to select respondents from each frame using a table of random numbers. The following formula would be used to come up with appropriate sample for the study. The instrument to be used for the study will be a questionnaire containing structured or closed ended questions, which is attached as an appendix. This will contain questionnaire that will be administered to respondents and will be developed so as to contain all the items that will help in achieving the objectives of the research as stated earlier. The questionnaire will be used to collect information about the respondent’s gender, level of education, knowledge of assisted suicide, and will be administered by the researcher. Validity During the study, correct sampling will be done to allow generalization to other people, times and contexts and hence give it external validity. The professionals in the department of psychology to assess the content and face legitimacy will subject the questionnaire to thorough scrutiny; content validity, measures the amount to which the test objects represent the area or universe of the trait or the stuff being measured. In order to establish the content validity of a measuring instrument, people must then be randomly chosen from various areas to give accurate representation of information in all areas. Comments and suggestions from peers and experts will be incorporated to improve the quality of the instruments to ensure the results and inferences of the study are accurate and meaningful. Face validity will be enhanced by subjecting the instrument and objectives of the study to scrutiny by three professionals their comments incorporated into the instrument before being used in the field. This is to ensure that the items are clear, concise, complete, comprehensive and unambiguous before being used in the field (Thomas, 2009). Reliability Reliability of the questionnaire to be used in this study will be assessed by pre-testing 30 patients not included in the study from a population with similar characteristics as the one of study area. The purpose of piloting will be to detect possible flaws in the measurement procedure, to identify ambiguously formulated items and to identify nonverbal behavior in the subjects that may signify discomfort about the wordings of the questions. Once the research proposal is approved, a letter of authorization to conduct research will be obtained from the school. This will be used to facilitate the acquisition of a research Permit from all the relevant areas. Once permit to conduct research is granted, permission to carry out research will be obtained from Medical Officer. The patients to be involved in the study will be visited in their respective wards and given a questionnaire to respond to. Once the respondents complete the questionnaire it will be collected on the spot so as to ensure a high response rate. In an event, that the respondent is illiterate and fail to respond to the questionnaire the researcher will aid the respondent to fill it. Proposed Analysis Plan Once the measuring instrument has been administered, the mass raw data will be systematically organized through coding to facilitate analysis. Quantitative methods of data analysis will be used with both descriptive as well as inferential statistics being used to explain the results of the study. Descriptive statistics would help the researcher to describe the population of study, while inferential statistics are deemed appropriate because they would enable the researcher to make inferences about a population based on the results of a representative sample. This would help the researcher to generalize the findings of a study to the population; therefore, the types of descriptive statistics that would be used would be the frequency and percentages while and inferential statistics would be the regression analysis. The regression analysis is deemed appropriate in this case because it would enable the researcher to establish whether a variable has an influence on a given dependent variable and because independent variables and dependent variable in this study are categorical thus best handled by regression analysis. Ethical section Before embarking on the research, approval from the relevant research committee must be sought to avoid unnecessary outcomes. A number of ethical issues need to be addresses carefully before embarking on research to avoid unnecessary suspicion. The questionnaires should be anonymous to enable respondent’s air their opinion freely without fear of any negative outcomes. They should also be informed in advance that their response would never be disclosed to any individual or authority to increases the level of confidence in them. Limitations of the study The main limitation to the study is lack of information on assisted suicides that would have benefited greatly from this research. Little research has been done on this topic and this minimizes the amount of information available for this study. It is hard to get patients who want assisted suicides or who have sought assisted suicide therefore some very important information from them may be missing. The sampling method contains leading questions therefore the real response from people may not be possible to have. Conclusions This research aims to provide critical analysis of life ending decisions, which is a matter of great ethical, religious and legal concern worldwide. This study will add a lot of information to already limited literature on assisted suicide. The participants will be in a position to know the public expectation of assisted suicide and hence enable them make informed choices whenever necessary. The research will be able to inform the public about preference to assisted suicide. This research will enable people to know the social implications of assisted research. The aforementioned discussion establishes the vitality of the selected research topic in our society today. The statistical and examination procedures in respect of this assignment shall reveal more about how assisted suicides affect our community and how legalizing is a favorable decision. Surveys and case studies shall enable in understanding the implications and complex problems related to this propaganda. The topic is vast and shall require committed hard work and skeptical research to help in concluding that assisted suicides must be made lawful around the world. References  Babbie, E. R. (2012). The practice of social research. Stamford: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Materstvedt, L. J., Clark, D., Ellershaw, J., Forde, R., Gravgaard, A. M. B., Muller-Busch, H. C., ... & Rapin, C. H. (2003). Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide: a view from an EAPC Ethics Task Force. Palliative Medicine, 17(2), 97-101. Sarah, K. (2010). Physician assisted suicide: Right to life or Right to death?. The Journal of Undergraduate Nursing Writing. 4:1, 24-30. Sincero, S.M. (2012). Advantages and Disadvantages of Surveys. Retrieved from Explorable.com: http://explorable.com/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-surveys Strohm, M. (2013). Physician-assisted suicide: is it murder or compassion for a doctor to help kill a patient. ABC action news. Retrieved from http://www.abcactionnews.com/dpp/marketplace/law_tv/physician-assisted-suicide-is-it-murder-or-compassion-for-a-doctor-to-help-kill-a-patient Thomas, C. (2009). Research paper: Euthanasia and assisted suicide a legal and ethical dilemma. Retrieved from http://commissiononassisteddying.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Evidence-from-Thomas-Croft-Euthanasia-and-Assisted-Suicide-a-Legal-and-Ethical-Dilemma-.pdf Appendices Questionnaire Question 5 4 3 2 1 How satisfied are you with assisted suicides Very satisfied Satisfied Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied Dissatisfied Very dissatisfied Should patients be allowed to end their lives? Strongly agree Agree Neither agree nor disagree Disagree Strongly disagree Should physicians be allowed to assist patients in suicide? Strongly agree Agree Neither agree nor disagree Disagree Strongly disagree Should assisted suicide be legalized? Very satisfied Satisfied Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied Dissatisfied Very dissatisfied Can you request for assisted suicide if suffering from incurable disease? Strongly agree Agree Neither agree nor disagree Disagree Strongly disagree Read More