In this video we will discuss how to write your safety, ethical and environmental issues
section.
We will talk about safety issues, ethical issues and environmental issues.
This section is marred under the exploration criterion.
It is very important that you include this section in your IA, even if it seems that
there are no such issues with your investigation.
Let's see some examples for each category.
Please note that these lists are not comprehensive and that you might have other issues depending
on your investigation.
Safety issues might include working with electricity, lasers, tools when building your apparatus,
radioactive material, any kind of glass equipment or vehicles such as bicycles, cars or scooters.
Ethical issues must be considered when your investigation involves humans or animals in
any shape or form or even when you use secondary data from a database.
In this case you have to make sure that the data was collected in an ethical manner.
As for environmental issues you must consider whether your investigation will create any
type of air pollution or water pollution, think whether it will create trash or other
materials that you have to dispose of and even consider issues with noise.
In my example IA, safety, ethical and environmental considerations are in subsection 4 under planning.
I start by acknowledging that my experiment is generally safe.
Then I mention minor safety issues due to the presence of water and electricity.
I add that my glass equipment can break and cause injury.
And I finish by stating that there are no major ethical considerations and that this
experiment does not harm the environment.
So overall it is important that you include a safety, ethical and environmental issues
section in your IA and think about even minor considerations in this area.
A final note, this section does not have to be long, so please don't invent artificial
issues that are not there.
If your experiment is safe, just say so and move on.
So now we have completed step 3, action 4 and you know how to write your safety, ethical
and environmental issues section.
In the next video we will start looking at analysis and we will discuss how to create
your raw data table.