Tag Archives: research

Another reason for IRBs and ethical guidelines for research

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There is a body of known research from around the mid 20th century that led to the formation of ethical guidelines for research and the establishment of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). Here is another study in the news that shows why these guidelines are necessary:

The United States apologized on Friday for an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which U.S. government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates, women and mental patients with syphilis.

In the experiment, aimed at testing the then-new drug penicillin, inmates were infected by prostitutes and later treated with the antibiotic.

“The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.

A researcher discovered this case while doing research that followed up on the Tuskegee experiments of the 1960s.

Politics in sociology

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A behavioral sciences graduate from Israel describes his experiences in a sociology department and compares sociologists to journalists at YNetNews:

Anyone who ever read a sociological essay immediately realized that to a large extent a sociologist is just like a newspaper columnist.

The sociologist’s columns tend to be longer and more deeply reasoned, yet at their base there will always be an expression of a wholly political view.

While this former student describes a department where only one ideology was allowed, he raises an interesting issue in sociological work. On one hand, research is supposed to be science: rational, logical arguments and theories built upon accurate measurements of what is actually happening in the world. On the other hand, researchers do have opinions and political stances and they tend to do work in areas of their own interest.This was first made clear to me in graduate school when professors quickly switched between their activist and political interests and the research pieces they were working on.

My research methods class starts with a discussion of Max Weber’s essay about “value-free” sociology. Weber suggests sociologists should not make value judgments. Students tend to argue that we all have a bias and this is very difficult to remove from our social science work.

The comparison to journalists is also interesting. In my introduction to sociology class, I suggest sociologists are different than journalists in that sociologists draw upon more comprehensive data and are not just writing opinions or drawing conclusions based on a few interviews. Additionally, journalists often describe trends or events while sociologists are interested in explanations and the mechanisms that lead from Point A to Point B.

It sounds like this former student’s call for ideological pluralism in sociology comes from some personal experiences where his opinions did not line up with those of his professors. Yet his essay is a reminder of the (sometimes thin) line between research and politics.

Using undergraduates in research experiments

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It is common for research experiments to use undergraduates as subjects: they are a convenient and often willing sample pool for researchers. These studies then draw conclusions about human behavior based on undergraduate subjects.

In Newsweek, Sharon Begley writes about a new study that suggests American undergraduates are unlike many people in the world and therefore, it is difficult to make generalizations based on them.

Three psychology researchers have done a systematic search of experiments with subjects other than American undergrads, who made up two thirds of the subjects in all U.S. psych studies. From basics such as visual perception to behaviors and beliefs about fairness, cooperation, and the self, U.S. undergrads are totally unrepresentative, Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia and colleagues explain in a paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. They share responses with subjects from societies that are also Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD), but not with humanity at large.

One way around such issues is to replicate studies with different people groups. The article describes some of these attempts, such as with the ultimatum game where two people have to negotiate a split of $10. When done with different people, the studies produce different results, suggesting that what we might think is “human nature” is heavily culturally dependent.

Another possible outcome of this study is that researchers may continue to use undergraduates but would have to scale back on their ability to generalize about humanity as a whole.

Finally, this study is a reminder that “typical” behavior in one culture is not guaranteed to be the same in another culture. What we may think of as givens can be quite different with people who do not share our cultural assumptions and practices.

An argument for reducing the amount of poor research

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Several academics  make an argument in The Chronicle for Higher Education for reducing the number of published research articles in order to limit low-quality publications. The measure of “poor research” is linked to the idea that later science should build upon previous findings:

Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.

The authors go on to say that uncited articles are akin to “useless information.” This seems a bit premature: uncited articles might be the result of studies in new fields or new approaches to old problems. Graduate students are often told to specialize and perhaps this article glut is due to very specific knowledge and more recent articles that have less of a broad appeal. Regardless, good journals are still publishing these pieces, indicating that somewhere in the peer review process, editors and reviewers thought the authors made a scientific contribution.

Some of the proposed solutions include a greater emphasis on citation and journal impact scores.