UGCNET Questions

Ethical research respects the autonomy and dignity of participants. Informed consent requires that individuals receive adequate information about the study and participate voluntarily. Researchers must also safeguard privacy, confidentiality and safety, minimizing any potential harm. Together, these responsibilities embody respect for persons and beneficence.

Option A:
Option A suggests systematic deception, which may be used in limited circumstances but never as a general principle. Even when minimal deception is used, participants must be debriefed and protected from harm.

Option B:
Option B is correct because it combines informed consent, voluntariness and protection of welfare, which are emphasized in major ethical codes such as the Belmont Report and institutional review guidelines.

Option C:
Option C proposes coercion, which violates the right to withdraw at any time without penalty. Compulsory participation is ethically unacceptable.

Option D:
Option D disregards confidentiality and privacy, exposing participants to potential social, legal or psychological harm.

Measures of dispersion indicate the extent to which scores differ from each other and from the central tendency. Standard deviation summarizes the average distance of scores from the mean; a larger value implies greater variability, while a smaller one indicates tighter clustering.

Option A:
This option is correct because standard deviation directly quantifies spread around the mean. It is routinely reported in research articles to describe variability and underpins many inferential statistics.

Option B:
This option, the arithmetic mean, is a measure of central tendency, not dispersion. It reports the average level of scores but not how spread out they are.

Option C:
The median is also a measure of central tendency. It indicates the middle score but does not describe whether the other scores are close together or widely scattered.

Option D:
The mode shows which score occurs most frequently, but it gives no information about how far other observations deviate from that value, so it is not a measure of dispersion.

The null hypothesis serves as a default position stating that any observed difference or association in the sample is due to chance. It posits no real effect, no difference or no relationship at the population level. Statistical tests assess whether the sample data provide enough evidence to reject this assumption. Thus, H0 represents the benchmark against which alternative claims are evaluated.

Option A:
Option A correctly captures the idea that the null expresses absence of effect or relationship. It is framed in a way that can be tested using probability models and sampling distributions. If evidence contradicts H0 beyond a chosen significance level, it may be rejected.

Option B:
Option B suggests that the null is what the researcher wants to prove at any cost, which is incorrect. Researchers often hope to reject the null in favor of their alternative hypothesis, but they must do so based on evidence, not desire.

Option C:
Option C claims that the null cannot be tested, which contradicts its very role in inferential statistics. Hypothesis tests are structured specifically around assessing H0.

Option D:
Option D concerning sample size is unrelated to the content of the null hypothesis. Sample size affects power but is not itself expressed in H0.