"The line between good and evil is permeable..."

August 7, 2015 5:38 PM

I need suggestions for readings about the importance of research ethics, please.

I teach an undergraduate social science research methods class; students pick a topic, go through IRB training, write a literature review, deploy a survey, collect data, analyze it, and write it up (along with cramming in some information about qualitative methods where I can). One of the hardest things I do is impress upon them that this set of skills is important, even if they're not going to be professional researchers, and oddly, one of the hardest sells is that research ethics are important.

To that end, can anyone suggest readings about real life studies that were not ethical and why it's important that we be ethical? I've seen this great thread about deception in research, but I'm looking for out and out ethical violations, not permitted deception.

If possible, I would prefer studies that are 1) not medical in nature (selling them that medical ethics are important is relatively easy!) 2) are recent (they think that establishing IRBs got rid of all the ethical issues ever) and 3) involve marginalized populations or families (or both).

I would really prefer not to discuss Milgram, Asch, or Zimbardo in detail if I can help it - many of them have talked about these studies in intro to psych or other classes.

I can fall back on Tuskegee and the Tea Room study if I need to, but I am hoping to be informative about issues they may not have heard about already.

Readings can be from any reputable source; I try to mix up academic readings with sources like NPR.

I appreciate any help! Googling has turned up lots of assertions that research ethics are important, but not many concrete examples as to why other than the, er, 'classic' studies above.

posted by joycehealy to Education (18 answers total)

Best answer: Henrietta Lacks is medical, but still a striking example.

What about the recent Facebook experiment?
posted by thomas j wise at 5:55 PM on August 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I totally meant to qualify HeLa too and forgot (it's been a long week...) It is medical, but I might would use it anyhow, if the book hadn't been the frosh summer read the year most of these folks came in. :) Maybe I should loop back to that, though, and there is a great conversation to be had there about race/class/gender etc, so we'll see what turns ups.

The FB study is timely and just about all of them (and myself) use FB, so, excellent, thank you!

(Okay, wandering off from the thread now...)
posted by joycehealy at 6:03 PM on August 7, 2015

Best answer: You might ask your IRB to collaborate with you here - I am in a different area of research compliance but I know my IRB colleagues are thrilled to work with professors on teaching their students about research ethics, and also that they keep abreast of recent issues that most people may not be aware of yet and would probably have great cutting edge case studies to share. Also just asking would probably make your IRB's day.
posted by Stacey at 6:24 PM on August 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I would recommend checking out the American Anthropological Association Handbook on Ethical Issues which is online (link goes to the table of contents). Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 have 25 ethical cases, presenting the ethical dilemma, and "solutions" and/or comments.
posted by gudrun at 6:27 PM on August 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Not sure if this exactly matches your criteria, but there was a recent hubbub regarding political science researchers from Dartmouth and Stanford futzing with a Montana election: Professors’ Research Project Stirs Political Outrage in Montana (NYT, Oct. 28, 2014).
posted by mhum at 7:06 PM on August 7, 2015

Best answer: I haven't looked through them, but you might get a lot of useful stuff out of the case studies resources page here.
posted by MsMolly at 7:06 PM on August 7, 2015

Best answer: I do an in class activity where they watch an episode of House where he violates the three Belmont Principles quite clearly. There is an associated worksheet the students have to fill out as they watch.
I only recently added it to my methods class but so far it seems to make ethics much more real to the students.
I'm happy to send you the PDF of the article (it was in my discipline's teachings journal) and my Word doc of the worksheet.

I also bring in a lot of my own IRB experiences and talk a lot about ethics in situ. I frame it like... You cannot really anticipate all possible outcomes (risks or benefits), so you really need to be engaging in reflexivity (qual or quant study) to try as hard as you can to embrace the spirit of the Belmont principles.

Also, I know you said no Milgram, but I show actual footage of the Milgram study and it freaks the students out (in a good way). It is only 3 minutes long. But it does seem to get the message across. I'm happy to send that YouTube link along as well.
posted by k8t at 8:35 PM on August 7, 2015

Best answer: Here's my methods class syllabus fwiw
https://www.academia.edu/11208918/COM_382_Social_Scientific_Approaches_to_Communication_Research_-_Winter_2015
posted by k8t at 8:36 PM on August 7, 2015

Best answer: Sophia Alim, 2014. "An initial exploration of ethical research practices regarding automated data extraction from online social media user profiles," First Monday, volume 19, number 7. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i7.5382

The popularity of social media, especially online social networks, has led to the availability of potentially rich sources of data, which researchers can use for extraction via automated means. However, the process of automated extraction from user profiles results in a variety of ethical considerations and challenges for researchers. This paper examines this question further, surveying researchers to gain information regarding their experiences of, and thoughts about, the challenges to ethical research practices associated with automated extraction. Results indicated that, in comparison with two or three years ago researchers are more aware of ethical research practices, and are implementing them into their studies. However, areas such as informed consent suffer from a lack of implementation in research studies. This is due to various factors, such as social media ‘Terms of Service’, challenges with large volumes of data, how far to take informed consent, and the definition of online informed consent. Researchers face a range of issues from digital rights to clear guidance. This paper discusses the findings of the survey questionnaire and explores how the findings affect researchers.

posted by Little Dawn at 8:39 PM on August 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I've taught the facebook experiment to four sets of undergrad research methods classes and I haven't seen it stick yet. I actively keep an eye out for good writings on it but I fear that it is too in the weeds for most of them. Their takeaway is "oh shit Facebook is evil" but the situation is too nuanced for one or two sessions of a methods class, in my opinion. Although next week my undergrad Internet research methods class is going to tackle it. I don't have high hopes for a lot of value to be honest.
posted by k8t at 8:44 PM on August 7, 2015

Best answer: Joseph Turow, Michael Hennessy, Nora Draper, June 2015. "The Tradeoff Fallacy: How Marketers Are Misrepresenting American Consumers And Opening Then Up to Exploitation," The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, via Slashdot.

The common goal involves predictive analytics—the manipulation of huge amounts of data about individuals to assess the likelihood that a particular kind of content or product will lead them act in a direction desired by the marketer.

Is the internet now just one big human experiment? [Guardian, 7/29/2014]

It's not only Facebook treating us like lab rats. Dating sites can manipulate our emotions, too – and blame it on user testing. The possibilities are endlessly scary.

Risks in Using Social Media to Spot Signs of Mental Distress [NYT 12/26/2014]

For one thing, said Dr. Allen J. Frances, a psychiatrist who is a professor emeritus at Duke University School of Medicine, crude predictive health algorithms would be likely to mistake someone’s articulation of distress for clinical depression, unfairly labeling swaths of people as having mental health disorders.

For another thing, he said, if consumers felt free to use unvalidated diagnostic apps on one another, it could potentially pave the way for insurers and employers to use such techniques covertly as well — with an attendant risk of stigmatization and discrimination.

“You would be mislabeling millions of people,” Dr. Frances said. “There would be all sorts of negative consequences.” He added, “And then you can have sophisticated employment consultants who will do the vetting on people’s psychiatric states, derived from some cockamamie algorithm, on your Twitter account.”

posted by Little Dawn at 9:10 PM on August 7, 2015

Best answer: Jumping off the "deeper dive into Milgram" idea pointed out above, the Radiolab episode 'Who's Bad?' offers something of a reinterpretation of the Milgram results, as interpreted by Alex Haslam. That segment's about 15 minutes long, but the essence of his thesis is that Milgram's [series of] experiments don't so much show that human beings will blindly obey orders, but that people will do things that shock their conscience if they believe it to be for the greater good - in this case, the advancement of science. I found it a pretty interesting clip and something to think about, both in research and beyond.

That said, I also really recommend that anyone teaching research to undergrads hammer home doing the right thing with subject and data privac. Because when I look back to the questionable things my peers and I did as undergraduates in a research setting, it was all about non-anonymizing anonymous results on a smallish, "this doesn't really matter that much" scale, and it's awful hard to related that to like, the Tuskeegee experiment.
posted by deludingmyself at 9:38 PM on August 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: The biggest recent one in medicine is Andrew Wakefield - his recruitment practices were wildly unethical for example (recruiting from kids' parties, asking lawyers involved in anti-vaccine trials to refer their clients, etc). Even if the rest of his research had been reasonable, the biased recruitment would have made his results uninterpretable.

Your students may not be planning to run medical studies, but they should be aware of the importance of their recruitment methods on their overall sample, and how this will affect validity of their results.
posted by tinkletown at 2:52 AM on August 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ps I know you said no medicine but the issue here wasn't harm to the kids (well that too), but the fact that it totally invalidated his findings.
posted by tinkletown at 2:55 AM on August 8, 2015

Best answer: A scan of recent table of contents from the journal Research Ethics would probably prove fruitful.

This article is also interesting and a good read: Lahman, M.K.E., Rodriguez, K.L., Moses, L., Griffin, K.M., Mendoza, B.M., & Yacoub, W. (2015). A rose by any other name is still a rose? Problematizing pseudonyms in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(5), 445-453. doi: 10.1177/1077800415572391

And from the same journal (another scan of this journal would probably also be good): Gunsulas et al. (2007) Improving the System for Protecting Human Subjects: Counteracting IRB “Mission Creep” Qualitative Inquiry, 13(5), 617-649. doi: 10.1177/1077800407300785
posted by sockermom at 6:13 AM on August 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The Boston College IRA oral history project is an interesting one...the guarantee of confidentiality was overturned by the courts
Boston College Belfast Project

and a recent one from Brisbane Australia about a covert research project into racism among bus drivers that was withdrawn...some of the academics involved went to the press to protest
Brisbane Bus Study
posted by sparkle55 at 9:45 PM on August 8, 2015

Best answer: The recent political science one where a paper was retracted from the journal Science because of problems with the data not being collected as described
Michael Lacour and the journal article retracted from Science
posted by sparkle55 at 4:31 AM on August 9, 2015

Response by poster: These are all best answers, seriously. I love the green. :) And now I wish I got an entire semester to just talk about ethics!
posted by joycehealy at 6:22 PM on August 11, 2015 [1 favorite]