Center for Ethics Education Research
Ethical Challenges for Research Extenders
Responsible for the Integrity of Community Addiction Research
Federal health disparity initiatives to achieve equity in community-based addiction treatment research has increased employment of indigenous research extenders (REs) as recruiters, data gatherers, and peer interviewers. While they help to form the essential collaborative link between addiction scientists and marginalized populations, recently the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has uncovered scientific misconduct involving REs. This two-year study is an important step toward understanding and measuring the ethics-related beliefs and motivation facilitating and impeding the RE’s contribution to addiction trials.
Results from previous work by members of the project team submitting this application has identified ethical attitudes toward community based addiction trials among urban street drug users (Fisher et al., 2008) and challenges to research integrity reported by RE’s across a broad range of translational research projects (Alexander & Richman, 2008; Gammon, True & Alexander, 2008). However to date there are no empirical data on linkages between REs’ attitudes toward community-based addiction trials and motives supporting the responsible conduct of RE’s contributions to these trials. This proposal represents a collaborative effort to provide the empirical knowledge base necessary to understand, from the perspective of REs, the research integrity challenges of implementing community-based addiction trials and to provide a psychometrically valid instrument that can assess these challenges and evaluate the success of research integrity training to promote the responsible conduct of RE work.
Specific Aims. Building upon the research team’s previous research, this application proposes a mixed method approach to achieve the following specific aims:
Aim 1. To provide a qualitative empirical base to enhance understanding of the linkages between REs’ shared community attitudes toward addiction research ethics and their commitment to research integrity.
Aim 2. To construct and psychometrically evaluate an instrument that can assess multiple components of beliefs and motives that facilitate or impede the integrity of recruitment and data collection conducted by REs in community–based addiction trials.
Long Term Objective. With increasing efforts to address health disparities and to achieve equity in community-based addiction intervention research for underserved populations, the use of REs as front-line research workers will continue to grow. When REs play a role in collaborative research, shared community values and experiences can affect research integrity in both positive and negative ways. The proposed study is an important step toward understanding and assessing the ethics-related norms and values of REs rooted both in their membership in the community being studied and in their role as research worker. One long term objective of our research agenda is to strengthen the research integrity of community-based addiction trials and help investigative teams mitigate risks to research integrity by identifying the link between RE shared community beliefs about randomized clinical trials for addictions and their affect on RE motivation to conduct this research responsibly. A second long term goal is to provide a psychometrically valid instrument that research teams can immediately use to assess RE research integrity vulnerabilities and to evaluate the efficacy of RE focused research integrity training programs for addiction trials.
This study is funded by the National Institute of Health. The principal investigator is Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D. The co-Investigators are Leslie Alexander, Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, and Gala True, Ph.D., Philadelphia Veteran's Administration Medical Center. Consultant Kenneth Richman, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Health Care Ethics at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science, is also contributing to the project.
