Manipulation in the Enrollment of Research Participants

Recruitment is a challenge for many biomedical research studies with human participants. Strategies to increase the speed and ease of recruitment are therefore valuable. One way to improve these strategies is to design them so as to make use of other factors that play a role in potential participant...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Hastings Center report 2013-03, Vol.43 (2), p.38-47
Main Authors: Mandava, Amulya, Millum, Joseph
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biomedical research
Choice Behavior
Cigarettes
Coercion
Communities
Deception
Decision Making
Duress
Ethics, Research
Experimentation
Gaudiya
Human subjects
Humans
Informed consent
Informed Consent - ethics
Informed Consent - psychology
Informed Consent - standards
Knowledge
Manipulation
Patient Selection - ethics
Personal Autonomy
Persuasion
Persuasive Communication
Philosophical analysis
Research Design
Research Personnel - ethics
Research Subjects - psychology
Respect
Social Perception
Social Values
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Recruitment is a challenge for many biomedical research studies with human participants. Strategies to increase the speed and ease of recruitment are therefore valuable. One way to improve these strategies is to design them so as to make use of other factors that play a role in potential participants’ decisions. In this paper, we analyze the noncoercive ways in which researchers can use knowledge about the decision‐making tendencies of potential participants in order to motivate them to consent to research enrollment. We identify which modes of influence preserve respect for participants’ autonomy and which disrespect autonomy, applying the umbrella term “manipulation” to the latter. We then apply our analysis to a series of cases adapted from the experiences of clinical researchers in order to develop a framework for thinking through the ethics of manipulating people into research participation. All manipulation disrespects autonomy and is therefore pro tanto wrong. However, only deceptive manipulation invalidates the consent that results from it. Use of the other forms of manipulation can be permissible, but only if the outcome of using manipulation is sufficiently good, and the research cannot be carried out using ethically preferable means to obtain consent.
ISSN:0093-0334
1552-146X
DOI:10.1002/hast.144