Kirsten Bartlett
I am currently studying for a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University and have managed to 
land myself back at my first love which is language. At the age of 20 I went to Japan with no idea what the country would be like and no understanding of the language. After 3 months of getting drunk in bars and attempting to communicate with the locals I had managed to acquire conversational Japanese and after a year living there with no formal instruction in Japanese I was told by Japanese strangers that I sounded like I had been brought up in Japan. It was quite a surprise to me to find that I appear to have a ‘natural talent’ for picking up languages (providing you don’t try to make me learn them from a book!) but in fact we all have a ‘natural talent’ for language and so began my fascination with how the mind ‘does’ language. My PhD is using text message shortcuts to investigate questions of how words are stored in the mind, how we access them and use them. I have a personal interest in the mind of the bilingual and would like to pursue this avenue at post doc.
I put myself forwards for the ethics post because I am interested in finding out what role the BPS plays in ethical issues not only in relation to psychological experiments but also in the ‘real world’. I am also interested in how psychology post grads feel about the process of ethical approval that we all go through before running experiments. When I first joined the ranks of academic psychologists I was surprised to find that there is little central control of ethics, publications and experiments, of course I now appreciate some of the reasons for this but I still feel that there must be huge variation in the processes of ethical approval depending on the institution involved. I would welcome any comments from psychology post grads regarding the process at their University.
You can contact me at k.e.bartlett@shu.ac.uk, and if you can, please take a few minutes to fill out this Ethics questionnaire.