Can Satire Match IRB Reality? Comment on Lederman's "Modest Proposal"

The last entry in the PoLAR symposium for which I will offer comments is Rena Lederman's "Comparative 'Research': A Modest Proposal concerning the Object of Ethics Regulation."

Lederman, an anthropologist and sometime member of the Princeton University IRB, challenges the regulatory defintion of research: "a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge." She correctly notes that the definition was crafted to distinguish the practice of medicine from biomedical research. As she puts it,

U.S. human subjects research regulations (known since 1991 as the “Common Rule” but formally set in place in the early 1970s) derive from earlier National Institutes of Health guidelines based on specifically biomedical experience and ethical problematics. Their logic goes something like this: First, medical therapy is appropriately evaluated in terms of individual patient interests, because its central concern is the direct improvement of individual patient well-being. Second, medical research is appropriately evaluated in terms of society’s and science’s interests, because its central concern is the production of knowledge “generalizable” beyond individual cases. And third, although physical risks to persons are inherent in both medical research and therapy, the risks to individuals are qualitatively greater in research (where individual persons are not the central concern) than in therapy (where they are). Consequently, research needs special oversight. (312)

[It's worth noting that the research definition entered the regulations as a result of congressional mandate; the National Research Act of 1974 instructed the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research to consider "the boundaries between biomedical or behavioral research involving human subjects and the accepted and routine practice of medicine." The result was the defintion of research now encoded in regulations.]

Lederman then explains that the boundaries between research and therapy remain fuzzy even for biomedical topics. A case study of an individual patient offers some contribution beyond therapy, but is it generalizable? What about quality improvement, like the Johns Hopkins checklist?

Finally, Lederman produces her "modest proposal":

If there are indeed other ways of knowing the world that are similarly entangled in the everyday but not yet benefiting from IRB oversight, doesn’t fairness dictate that all of these modes be surveilled in the same manner? What would happen if ethnographers made common cause—all in (or all out)—not just with ethnographically inclined sociologists, political scientists, religion scholars, and folklorists but also with urban planners, architects, engineers, literary and cultural studies scholars, and colleagues in college and university writing programs—all of whom are engaged in varieties of research-with-human-participants? (320)

She then goes on to note similarities between the methods of ethnographers and novelists, asking why the latter have not been swept into the IRB dragnet.

The problem with Lederman's self-described "parodic" comparison is that some regulators and IRBs are already enacting parody as policy. As Lederman notes, "IRBs are already involving themselves in the lives of writing teachers, journalists, and others who had not heard of “human subjects research” until their own work came under scrutiny." (324, n. 10)

Other countries have taken this further. The Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2007) observes that the British definition of human subjects research "could count poetry, painting and performing arts as research," then fails to offer a defintion of human subjects research that clearly excludes those endeavors. It then goes on to state that "the conduct of human research often has an impact on the lives of others who are not participants," raising the possibility that a novelist might violate Australia's ethical standards without even talking to anyone. (p. 8) More recently, in February 2008, a Canadian committee proposed adding a chapter on Research Involving Creative Practices to Canada's Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans. The draft chapter suggests that some creative processes are outside the purview of ethics boards, but it does not make a good case for any review of creative work, except that "researchers from a wide range of disciplines" would feel cheated if artists got special treatment.

It's too late for reductio ad ridiculum; the ridiculous is at the gates.

Like Bosk's essay, Lederman's expresses frustration with IRB oversight of ethnography without clearly calling for an end to such oversight, much less offering a strategy to achieve that goal. She reports, offhand, that when oral historians seemed to have escaped IRB jurisdiction, the anthropologists she knew "were briefly thrilled, but there was no notable effort to follow suit." (318) Why this passivity? I am less interested in why ethnographers have not made common cause with novelists than in why they have not made common cause with themselves.

Oral History Association Plans Revised Guidelines

The Oral History Association has posted a call for suggestions for revision of its Principles and Standards. Oral historians who find themselves trying to explain their work to IRBs often rely on this statement, so it needs to be as clear as possible. I encourage concerned oral historians to join in the revision process.

Critiques of Consent Forms

Two items in the November 2007 PoLAR symposium question the utility of written consent forms. Both offer important insights about the difficulty of relying on written consent, though neither presents a persuasive alternative.

Shannon, "Informed Consent"

Jennifer Shannon's contribution is "Informed Consent: Documenting the Intersection of Bureaucratic Regulation and Ethnographic Practice." Shannon contrasts two experiences she had preparing written consent forms for interviews with American Indians.

From 2001 to 2003, Shannon worked as a fieldworker for the National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian. Working with curator Cynthia Chavez, she modified an existing museum consent form to stress that the museum would seek additional approval if it wanted to use the informant's interview or image aside from a planned exhibit and related publications. This did the trick:

Whether because it was written with the aim to increase participant’s control over their contributions, the reputation of the Smithsonian was changing in Indian country, or because it was necessary in order to participate in the exhibition, in the process of fieldwork, the . . . release form was not met with resistance; Native people read the form carefully and signed it willingly. (233)

In 2004, Shannon had a new role: graduate student at Cornell University, and when she returned to fieldwork, she sought approval from the university IRB. Though "wary of inserting documents between my interlocutors and myself because of the sense of formality it introduced," she followed the IRB instructions to produce a written consent form. (236).

It bombed. Though the IRB let her write her own consent form, experts didn't like it. Joe Podlasek, the director of a Chicago nonprofit, and two National Museum curators all warned her that the document was too "legal looking," that "it inserted the institution of Cornell between community members and myself, and that once 'institutions' come into the mix, Indians are very, and rightly, 'skeptical.' [A curator] also pointed out the manipulative power inherent in saying “sign these documents, or you can’t participate.” (234) Fortunately, the IRB let her modify her proposal and substitute verbal, recorded consent.

What's interesting about this story is that no IRB member of staffer led Shannon astray. Rather, it was the IRB's standard operating procedures that made her write the bad consent form: "When preparing for the [IRB] requirements, I produced the consent form in a routine way according to guidelines for recorded interviews. It did not occur to me to make a case for exemption . . . " (235) This kind of IRB-caused harm is impossible to track, but I suspect it is rather common. When you flood the Web with bad advice about research ethics, it is bound to cause unknown harms.

On the other hand, I am a bit wary of Shannon's easy acceptance of the experts' claims that Indians don't like written consent forms, especially after her good experience with the Smithsonian form. With the exception of Podlasek, she doesn't report anyone expressing their own unwillingness to sign a written form, only people guessing that other people wouldn't like the Cornell form. That's like letting one person guess that another person will find a survey invasive. At the very least, this seems worthy of an empirical study. Of course, it would be great fun trying to devise the consent procedure for a study about consent.

Nor does Shannon convince me that verbal consent is taken any more seriously than written consent. She writes

In one interview with an anthropologist who was working on an upcoming exhibition, after she agreed to be recorded, I said, “OK, then I have to say my little spiel” about the ways in which the recording could be used. She laughed, and asked, “Human subjects?” And I said yes, laughing apologetically. It was a moment where we were both complicit, in our joking, critical of the bureaucratic hoops we must jump through. There was no resistance or negotiating. She said she had had to do the same thing when she did research for her degree. This eye-rolling compliance to formalized consent occurred a number of times during my interviews with NMAI staff . . . . (235)

How is this an improvement over written consent?

And while Shannon endorses Podlasek's claim that her verbal script "was more 'flexible' and community members could discuss their own stipulations for consent and use of the material" (234), she does not report what stipulations community members imposed or why it would be easier to do that on a recording rather than on paper.

Jacob, "Form-Made Persons"

A second item, Marie-Andrée Jacob's "Form-Made Persons: Consent Forms as Consent’s Blind Spot," suggests how little attention research participants or patients give to consent forms.

Jacob observed the use of consent forms in transplant units in American and Israeli hospitals. As part of her work in the U.S., she had to devise a consent form that met an IRB's strict guidelines:

My forms would be approved as ethical only if I was to mechanically mimic the aesthetics of a template form’s rubrics, classification, and styles, even if it meant that some categories and boxes were bound to remain blank. This aesthetic work of uniformity had to be done in very literal ways, and features such as fonts, margins, and subtitles were of great importance. One could not change the order of the presentation of the bullet points, of information points. The ethical approval of a project can be conditional upon one’s respect of the “template” and the “boiler” provided by the institution in question. This seems to imply that bureaucratic cleanliness is conflated with consent ethics, and both are purposefully composed as clear, transparent. (253)

Donors and recipients of organs were faced with even more elaborate forms, warning “Do not sign this form without reading and understanding its contents.” (255)

Yet patients, research subjects, and even donors--people who were giving up major chunks of their bodies--spent little time on the forms:

A high-level administrator and transplant surgeon, who in his work maneuvers consent forms on a daily basis, performed crisp sarcasm by signing the consent form to participate in my research without even looking at it and saying to me and to a few colleagues standing by, “Oh, I feel much more protected now that I signed this.” In signing, this surgeon both reiterated his authority above the researcher within the hospital bureaucracy and submitted to the powerful yet familiar rigor of this same bureaucracy. Here, the performance of sarcastic humor appeared as a way to defuse the submission inherent in signing itself but also to assert his authority in a rubber-stamp form, about what seemed inconsequential to him. (260)

And

An American mother who at the time of my fieldwork was undertaking medical tests to see if she could donate a kidney to her son characterized all the procedures and form filling as “just something to go through.” Patients expressed this sense of “going through” recurrently to me. This mother, for example, was frustrated that the screening and evaluations take so much time: “It’s like, can’t you get me through this quickly?” she lamented. (257)

In an extreme case, organ donors in an Israeli hospital willingly signed a consent form that had been through so many generations of photocopies that neither doctor nor donor could read it. Since neither Americans nor Israelis read the forms they signed, Jacob finds the illegilble Israeli form the more honest.

What is the Alternative?

While both authors present the problems inherent in written forms, I don't think either author grapples with the real purposes of such forms.

The first is to clarify responsibility when something goes wrong. If the interview or the transplant goes fine, then no one needs the form. It's when one party feels ill-used that both parties to an agreement go to their files to figure out if a promise was broken. Since neither Shannon nor Jacob observed such a dispute, it's hard to accept their dismissal of written consent. It's like hearing someone complain about how uncomfortable motorcycle helmets are, without discussing the protection they offer in a crash. Yes, they are uncomfortable, and usually unnecessary, but that's not the point.

As counter-examples, I would offer the cases of two academic psychologists: J. Michael Bailey and Elizabeth Loftus, both of whom were the subjects of formal complaints by people they had interviewed. Bailey faced an investigation by his university, and Loftus's interview became part of a $1.3 million lawsuit against her and other defendants. In both cases, interviewer and interviewee had very different memories about the circumstances of the interview.

Written forms would not have provided full information about those circumstances, and a signed consent form cannot prove that the signer read the form carefully. But, as Shannon observed, some signers do read carefully, while others at least have the opportunity to do so. Thus, written forms in those cases might have avoided or helped resolve the dispute. It's not a perfect system, but neither Shannon nor Jacob present a superior one.

A second purpose for written forms is to allow access by other researchers, an important goal of oral history interviews. Neither Shannon nor Jacob address this issue, and Shannon's essay is particularly troublesome in this regard. The written form she developed at the Smithsonian states that "images, tapes, and transcripts of interviews will be placed in the Archives of the NMAI," (247) but it provides no mechanism for those images, tapes, and transcripts to be used by researchers. That is, even if a researcher is required to seek permission before using an interview in a publication, how is that researcher to know which interviews are of interest if not even a summary can be released without permission? What happens if an interviewee cannot be located to grant permission? What happens if an interviewee dies? Is the Smithsonian required to archive the interview in perpetuity, knowing that no one will ever be allowed to listen to it?

As John A. Neuenschwander has shown, no one has yet drafted an oral history consent form that accounts for all the important contingencies without growing into a long, tangled, and legalistic contract. I'm sure that Shannon and Jacob could poke holes in any of the forms he presents, but I'm not sure they could improve on them.

AHA Calls for Comments on Training

At AHA Today, the American Historical Association's blog, Rob Townsend calls for responses to OHRP's recent invitation to comment on training for IRBs. As Townsend notes, the very phrasing of OHRP's questions suggest a continued inability to remember that the office's policies have effects beyond medical research. On the other hand, he notes, some kind of training mandate is likely, so it would be best for historians not to remain silent.

Reform or Revolution? Comment on Bosk, "The New Bureaucracies of Virtue"

Following the introduction, the first substantive piece in the PoLAR symposium is Charles L. Bosk, "The New Bureaucracies of Virtue or When Form Fails to Follow Function."

In the past, Bosk has advocated living with IRB review. As he wrote in 2004

Prospective review strikes me as generally one more inane bureaucratic requirement in one more bureaucratic set of procedures, ill-suited to accomplish the goals that it is intended to serve. Prospective review, flawed a process as it is, does not strike me as one social scientists should resist. After all, we agree with its general goals: that our informants should not be subject to untold risks, that they be treated with decency, that their confidentiality and anonymity be safeguarded, when feasible. Given this, we should not waste our energies resisting a process that has an enormous amount of both bureaucratic momentum and social consensus behind it. Instead, we should focus our energies on reforming and revising procedures; we should fix the system where it is broken.

[Charles Bosk, "The Ethnographer and the IRB: Comment on Kevin D. Haggerty,'"Ethics Creep: Governing Social Science Research in the Name of Ethics'," Qualitative Sociology 27 (December 2004), 417.]

But at some point in 2005 or 2006, an IRB seems to have really pissed him off. In this essay, he writes that "having now been on the receiving end of IRB objections that I find incomprehensible, I appreciate my colleagues' multiple frustrations." (204) He now seems to think the system is not merely broken, but so defectively designed that it cannot be repaired:

The presumption of prospective review—that our subjects are in need of protection— has embedded within it an insulting distrust of our integrity and motives. The insult inherent in a regulatory regime based on distrust deepens when the barriers the review system places between us and the doing of our research appear to protect powerful institutions from close scrutiny more than they guarantee the well-being of our research subjects. For me, the most serious defect of the current regulatory system is that the requirements of policy reduce and trivialize the domain of research ethics. In the process, our ability to conceptualize, discuss, and make sense of the ethical problems of ethnographic work is dulled. As we do our work, we face ethical dilemmas aplenty, almost none of which have to do with the dual mandate of prospective research review—the adequacy of the consent process, which is invariably reduced to concern about a "formal document" or potential risks to subjects. (194)

Bosk's essay is rich in ideas--too many, really, for an essay of this length. I will do my best to unpack them.

What is the problem?

Bosk helpfully outlines six elements he finds most common in social science critiques of the IRB system, critiques so numerous that they amount, he writes, to a "chorus of complaint."

1. "The mission creep or bureaucracy run amok complaint: The process of prospective review is unwarranted. There is no convincing evidence that the risks attached to social science research justify it . . .

2. "The inappropriate model argument: Even if what we did was sufficiently risky to warrant prospective review, the model that we are saddled with is so rooted in the model of the biomedical randomized clinical trial that we cannot use it sensibly . . .

3. "The fetish of written consent objection . . .

4. "Journalists are allowed to do what we seek to do without fetters . . .

5. "The chilling effect fear . . .

6. "There is no evidence that IRBs have been very successful in preventing just those abuses that they were designed to create argument." (200)

This is a pretty good list, though I think it omits two important elements. First, Bosk writes of the "biomedical model" only as one in which "an empirical risk calculation is available." That overlooks another element of the biomedical model: that risks are better known to the researcher than the subject. That is, an oncologist testing a cancer drug is expected to know much more about the risks of the drug than the subject taking it. By contrast, an informant in an ethnographic study will often know more about the risks of sharing a particular bit of information than does the ethnographer.

Second, Bosk's "chilling effect fear" element conflates two separate arguments. One is that ethnographers do not share the physician's duty to do no harm, and should be free to hold individuals, organizations, and communities to account for their behavior. The other, more properly labeled a chilling effect, is that scholars will be deterred from controversial research. These are distinct complaints. The first, for example, complains that IRBs might prevent researchers from studying the police, lest they harm the police--the subjects of their research. The second complains that IRBs might prevent researchers from studying victims of police brutality--claiming to protect the victims, but in effect protecting the police.

Bosk seems to find this six-part argument convincing, noting his "general agreement with its basic thrust." (196) This is something of a contrast to his position in 2004, in which he rejected comparisons between ethnographers and journalists. [Charles L. Bosk and Raymond G. De Vries , "Bureaucracies of Mass Deception: Institutional Review Boards and the Ethics of Ethnographic Research," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 595 (2004), 255.]

But Bosk is not satisfied to leave the complaint there. He writes, "the problem with the chorus of complaint is that it fails to explain the organizational logic that enabled, even encouraged, such pernicious 'mission creep' or what to do about it now that it has become an inescapable part of the lived experience of ethnographic research." (200) In the rest of the essay, he addresses those two questions.

Whose fault is the problem?

Bosk offers two sets of culprits.

The first are the IRB administrators who have flourished at research universities.

The system of IRB review is often described as a peer review system. In reality, it is faux peer review. The labor of preparing documents, communicating negative judgments to researchers, and then negotiating with outraged, disgruntled faculty thrown off schedule by niggling objections falls to personnel that faculty most likely perceive as "merely" secretarial. The standard complaints about prospective review of research fail to mention the officeholders that administer the IRB system. IRBs are spoken of as monolithic entities. Two features of the administrative structure necessary to make compliance with federal regulation deserve underscoring. First, new occupations, training programs, and career ladders provide a great deal of practical authority to the new functionaries. Second, the functionaries who staff the new bureaucracies of virtue are able to create the impression of efficiency by shifting burdens directly to researchers and their staff. Action on proposals, a measure of administrative activity, occurs when proposals are returned to researchers for reasons no more serious than incorrect font size, incorrect pagination, or other niggling matters. (198)

Such "bureaucratic organization," he warns, "leads workers to ignore goals and focus on, even sanctify the means or operating rules and procedures. The forms properly filled out and filed, the meeting of organizational timetables, and the exercise of authority by those who possess it—all have a value that transcends the original motives and intentions that created the formal organization." (202)

In making this argument, Bosk seems to lean heavily on Caroline Bledsoe et al., "Regulating Creativity: Research and Survival in the IRB Iron Cage." I don't get the sense that he has done any original research into university IRB offices and the trans-university organizations (PRIM&R, AAHRPP, etc.) that drive them. That's a pity, because more work could be done there.

Oddly, having argued that real power lies with the "functionaries," Bosk goes on to write that "we seem to forget that those who serve on IRBs are our colleagues, that their service spares us unwanted burdens, and that they deserve a civil dialogue." (205) That is hard to square with his argument that the real problems in prospective review come from administrators who--in effect--are not our colleagues, whose work creates unnecessary burdens, and whose "niggling" concern over typography does not constitute a civil dialogue.

Bosk is not content to blame the bureaucrats; he believes that ethnographers are somehow responsible for their own problems. He laments that the "chorus of complaint" fails to understand "why researchers did not more actively resist their own silencing." (207)

More active than what? The current IRB regime dates back only to 1998, and the OPRR crackdown against several research universities. In November 1999 and May 2000, the American Association of University Professors met with representatives of the American Anthropological Association, the American Historical Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, the Oral History Association, and the Organization of American Historians, after which the AAUP produced its 2000 report, "Institutional Review Boards and Social Science Research." In April 2000, Murray Wax outlined many of the standard arguments Bosk cites, testifying to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission that "the gravest ethical problem facing the people studied by anthropological research is posed by unknowing and overzealous IRB's and by governmental regulators attempting to force qualitative ethnographic studies into a biomedical mold."

This is not to say that ethnographers did all they could to fight IRB oversight. But it's not clear from Bosk's essay that he is familiar to the resistance going back to 1966.

What is to be done?

Bosk's real grievance with the chorus of complaint is not that it is inaccurate, but that "the problem with complaint, the undeniable compensatory charm that a sputtering public moral outrage provides notwithstanding, is that it does not create a viable alternative to the status quo." (200) Perhaps, but Bosk is less clear than many choristers about his own ideas for reform. In particular, I could not determine from his essay if he still believes, as he did in 2004, that social scientists should accept prospective review, or if he now seeks to free them from IRB jurisdiction.

Parts of the present essay suggest that Bosk still seeks accommodation, as when he suggests that the problems with IRBs are so small that they "might be remedied by educating better IRB members about the nature of qualitative methods or of the regulations themselves." (206) But when he writes of flaws "inherent" and "embedded" in the present regime, that suggests a wish for exclusion. Does Bosk endorse the AAUP's 2006 recommendation that "research on autonomous adults whose methodology consists entirely in collecting data by surveys, conducting interviews, or observing behavior in public places, be exempt from the requirement of IRB review—straightforwardly exempt, with no provisos, and no requirement of IRB approval of the exemption"? I can't tell.

Instead of a clear program for reform, Bosk calls for

an expanding collection of narratives that describe and analyze experiences with prospective review . . . By continuing to collect narratives, we will be in a better position to distinguish common problems generic to the review process across institutions from those resulting from idiosyncratic local interpretations. In the generic cases, we are then in a position to separate those that might be remedied by educating better IRB members about the nature of qualitative methods or of the regulations themselves. Idiosyncratic local problems require local solutions. (206)

This leaves open some important questions.

First, what makes an effective narrative? Bosk's own essay begins with two anecdotes, one of which hinges on the very fetishization of written consent that Bosk identifies as one of the elements of the "chorus of complaint." But the anecdote, while attributable to the University of Pennsylvania, bears no date or student name. As Bosk probably understands (though he doesn't say so here), it takes some courage for a researcher, especially a student, to come forward with complaints about powerful figures in one's own university. But without specifics, the narrative may lack authority. Does Bosk's anecdote meet Bosk's own standards?

Second, how many narratives do we need? We don't lack for them; follow the links on this blog, and you'll find dozens. The August 2005 issue of the Journal of Applied Communication Research alone contains twenty anonymous narratives along with several signed articles. Will a hundred narratives do more work than fifty?

Third, and most importantly, whom are these narratives intended to persuade? If we believe Bosk's claim that the real power lies in the hands of functionaries who value the forms of bureaucracy more than the function of research ethics, then no number of complaining narratives is likely to change anything. And if we believe that power lies in the hands of well-meaning but ignorant IRB members, then the current chorus of complaint should be sufficient to alert them to the problems of prospective review.

Bosk paraphrases Marx to say that "the point . . . is not simply to complain about the world but to change it." (196) But his call for more narratives is more a means to amplify the chorus of complaints than to effect change itself. The chorus of complaint has, in fact, suggested several alternatives to the current regime. Bosk has not.

The New Bureaucracies of Virtue

Pity the poor blogger. When I started this blog, I expected to report on the occasional journal article on IRB review of the social sciences. Instead, I find that journals insist on publishing special symposium issues with several articles on the topic. Rather than sipping a beer I must down a six-pack.

In the coming weeks I plan to take on the November 2007 issue of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Vol. 30, Number 2), which includes eight articles totally 147 pages, some of them based on an October 2006 symposium at Cornell. In their introduction to the symposium, organizers Marie-Andrée Jacob and Annelise Riles, write,

Although we certainly do not defend the current regulatory framework of research, we also wanted to press the pause button on the ambient criticism of IRBs and accompanying expressions of fears and anxieties about their impact on research and free speech. Instead, we wanted to trigger a discussion that would harness, among other things, these practical anxieties in the service of a larger theoretical and epistemological inquiry. (183)

As someone more interested in the practical than the theoretical or epistemological, I'm not sure this is my thing, but I'll do my best. And while I can't promise to comment on all the essays, here's the table of contents:

SYMPOSIUM: Papering Ethics, Documenting Consent: The New Bureaucracies of Virtue

• Marie-Andrée Jacob and Annelise Riles, "The New Bureaucracies of Virtue: Introduction"
  
  
• Charles L. Bosk, "The New Bureaucracies of Virtue or When Form Fails to Follow Function"
  
  
• Amy Swiffen, "Research and Moral Law: Ethics and the Social Science Research Relation"
  
  
• Jennifer Shannon, "Informed Consent: Documenting the Intersection of Bureaucratic Regulation and Ethnographic Practice"
  
  
• Marie-Andrée Jacob, "Form-Made Persons: Consent Forms as Consent’s Blind Spot"
  
  
• Stefan Sperling, "Knowledge Rites and the Right Not to Know"
  
  
• Adriana Petryna, "Experimentality: On the Global Mobility and Regulation of Human Subjects Research"
  
  
• Rena Lederman, "Comparative 'Research': A Modest Proposal concerning the Object of Ethics Regulation
  

Social Scientists Debate Defense Department Funding

Today's Washington Post reports contrasting reactions to a Department of Defense plan to give $50 million in grants to social scientists to study such issues as China's military and political violence in the Islamic world. [Maria Glod, Military's Social Science Grants Raise Alarm," Washington Post, 3 August 2008]

Some anthropologists quoted in the story seem to reject any military sponsorship as unethical. David Price, whose book on anthropologists during World War II is on my reading list but not yet in my library, objects that the program "sets up sort of a Soviet system, or top-down system. If you look at the big picture, this will not make us smarter -- this will make us much more narrow. It will only look at problems Defense wants us to in a narrow way." By contrast, Rob Townsend of the American Historical Association notes that "hopefully, a project like Minerva will provide some historical perspective before, rather than after, it is needed."

The Post correctly explains that this debate is a replay of controversies in the 1960s, when the Pentagon and CIA sponsored studies of Latin America and Southeast Asia, including the infamous "Project Camelot." Throughout the 1960s and 70s, scholars struggled to find ways to lend their skills and insight to sound public policy without sacrificing their intellectual independence and integrity. Obviously, this is not an easy thing to do, and questions of sponsorship remain among the most difficult ethical problems faced by social scientists.

For a blog about IRBs, the salient point is the irrelevance of the Belmont Report to such questions. The authors of that report were steeped in the history of medical experimentation, and the report reflects their concerns about past abuses of poor ward patients, Nazi concentration camp prisoners, and the rural black men enrolled in the Tuskegee syphilis study. They knew nothing of Project Camelot, anthropology's "Thai affair," or less spectacular concerns about corporate sponsorship. As a result, the Belmont Report, while getting rather specific about such medical concerns as selection of subjects, says nothing about the conflicting duties to sponsors, subjects, and the truth. When applied to social science, the report gives the wrong answers to some questions, and no answers to others. And if anyone were to attempt to write a Belmont-style report on the ethics of social science, they would find various scholarly disciplines clashing over programs like this one.