"Booooooyaahhhh...I'm not really pregnant!"
 

Teen fakes pregnancy as a school project. Six-month-long fake out was part of a social experiment for the 17-year-old's senior project.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42711421..._and_parenting

I consider this to be a brilliant study with participant observation methodology. I hope she gets college offers, scholarships, and writes some research articles to get some publications. :)

That's awesome.

I admire her determination and commitment. I support a child of mine wanting to do this.

I'm not quite feeling this. What's been advanced here?

Ok, you tell or let your friends/classmates observe your "pregnancy." Some are likely to stand with you, others likely to talk about you or shun you. ...predictable responses in both directions, so what's been learned from her exercise?

Besides, I'd think her real friends, those that stood with her, might feel a bit disillusioned at her experiment for a minute. Hopefully, they'd all get past it, though.

We don't have the benefit of her final report.

I don't know. It seemed that the article addressed your very issue.

Of course I could be reading it wrong.

I saw her on the Today show this morning and I found her observations about how people treated her to be pretty interesting.

First of all, if there are two completely disparate reactions that are both possible, it's not at all "predictable" ... second, this kind of hand-waving ("Who cares of people treat a pregnant 17 year old like shit? Shouldn't she expect it?") is kind of the point of the project.

It's a lot for her to take on, and something most of us will only experience vicariously through her report. I'm sure you can see some value in that?

It feels unethical.

I am most surprised that the not-really-father-to-be's parents weren't included in the knowledge, as well as the girl's own siblings. I understand she may have wanted to include reactions from family members, but I'm sure throughout the 6 months, the boyfriend's parents had time to accept the idea and possibly bond with this girl over her "pregnancy." I'm sure they are partly relieved, but I'm sure there's a sense of some loss there as well that they no longer have a grandchild on the way. That part I could never justify to myself.

What I found scariest about this project was that her high school graduation depended on it- if her project was a failure to launch or someone broke the secret that she wasn't really pregnant, she would not have been able to graduate. Which a- seems like a way-too-serious project for a high school student and b- must have been really scary. Not that her boyfriend or mother would intentionally sabotage her, but accidents happen.

That was my thought, too. Particularly with family, it's more than just noting reactions; it's playing real emotional numbers on them.

If they'd been real jerks to her though, would it have been different? Depending on the time frame and local laws and such, she still, theoretically, could have gotten an abortion after six months even if just barely. Would it have been unjustifiable to do so purely because of the grandparents? I don't think so. (Views on abortion aside, that wouldn't be the reason for making the call.)

However, I think you're right in that this never would have gotten past an IRB for that reason. Had she not identified a 'father' and informed her parents, then it's possible that an IRB would have approved it.

In any sort of study, if things go wrong, you still typically report what happened and why things went wrong. Even though this was a high school project, I suspect, and would like to believe that no matter what was said, if the truth had gotten out, the student would have been able to write about her experience for the duration.

It probably wasn't as do-or-die as you're making it. She probably had a plan b on how to handle her project if this project doesn't go as planned. She could still write about how the early stages of her fake pregnancy turned out and how people reacted when she was outed.

Yeah and that's a risk of observational methods and participant observational methods, in general. I would have preferred if the study sample only consisted of the people at her high school. That would be impossible.

She definitely should have told the boyfriend's parents.

I don't know how concrete these observations could be - she didn't do this in a vacuum. That is, everyone already knew her and had opinions of her previously. People aren't going to react exactly the same way to every person that gets pregnant.

Maybe a better way to do this experiment would have been with another girl in on it - with as identical as possible social and class standing - as a "control" and contrast what happened to both of them when one of them got "pregnant."