 The topic we are going to discuss now is ethical issues in vulnerable populations. Research ethics standards apply best to the sample composed of competent adults with well-developed sense of autonomy, thus allowing them to make fully informed decisions on their own. But the vulnerable populations cannot take their decisions on their own. The researchers' role is to approach these people in a good faith and if they agree to participate, cause them no harm. It is very important that the human subjects of our research do not cause any harm to them. However, this may be the most difficult type of participant to procure because they are really readily available and willing. The vulnerable populations are mostly not available for our research. For example, if we talk about a specific population like transgenders, we need to approach them in a community, rather than study them as a passer-by or ask them some random questions and research them. Advantaged adults with the exception of college students, organizational employees and respondent to opinion polls and survey rarely become participants in social and behavioral research. There are many such samples that we do general research but we cannot do any social or experimental research with them. As a survey, opinion polls and other things we get students and organizational employees but if we ask them to participate in an experiment, then probably this is not possible and most researchers choose vulnerable populations to be involved in the experiment. Many of the research populations that mental health experts are interested in are constrained or vulnerable in a way that prevent them from exercising full self-determination. These populations include children, institutionalized and those who are high-risk for possibly preventable outcome. So, these are the people who are not readily available to give us mostly data but researchers and mental health professionals are very much interested in doing research with them. For example, if I give you the example of the monster study which is one of a very famous unethical experiment which is being done in 1939 by Dr. Johnson in Lava University, he was having a stuttering problem himself and he has a bias in his mind that his imperfections and speech are acquired and for that he selected 22 orphaned children and he experimented for six months and in a different way, the normal children's speech imperfections he tried to introduce and in the result of that, the children had various psychological problems that he created. Some of them started with a stuttering, some of them lost their language, some of them had different kinds of speech imperfections or loss of confidence. Over 70 years later, some of the unwitting volunteers sued the state of Lava that the reason for their mental health suffering was an experiment, which was true because the long-term effect of that was on their entire life and the normal children, through the conditioning of those experiments, they learned things like this which were wrong or dangerous for their normal life. U.S. federal regulations specify populations that require special attention and consideration because of their vulnerabilities. Such researches that took place in the 1930s and in which there have been unethical experiments, including the monster study, these kinds of researches are not present today. More recently, U.S. federal regulations made such rules for children, prisoners, pregnant women, mentally disabled persons, economically and educationally disadvantaged people, that what questions we can ask from them and what we cannot. So, a guideline is available for that. Then some non-institutionalized study population pose additional vulnerabilities because of their mental and emotional condition, such as chronic depression. It is very important to know that the non-institutionalized population can also have additional vulnerabilities. And they can also be in the result of research, if some of the questions are repeatedly asked or probed, then they can also be in the result of depression. For example, a woman who has been through PTSD and she is often reminded of a specific incident in her research reference, then she can be taken to depression. Others are vulnerable because of the physical illness. Similarly, physical illnesses make a lot of people a vulnerable population. And due to a specific medical health condition, they cannot participate in any research in that way, giving you a very brief example. For example, the children who are doing research on cancer, who are working on students, who are working on cancer psychosocial determinants, because of that, what problems can people face in their psychological and social life, they are usually advised that they will not collect data from the patients of stage 3 or 4 because of looking into their serious physical illness.