clinicalresearchthings

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protect your co-authors

People with less social power have a lot of stories of being ignored.  Conference invitations go to the two male co-authors, not to the woman.  People of color get moved out of research teams.  Don’t let that happen to your co-authors.  Put them back on the email thread.  Keep their names on your joint work.  

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The researchers randomly assigned the children to receive different types of praise. For some of the children, they praised the action: “It was good that you gave some of your marbles to those poor children. Yes, that was a nice and helpful thing to do.” For others, they praised the character behind the action: “I guess you’re the kind of person who likes to help others whenever you can. Yes, you are a very nice and helpful person.” A couple of weeks later, when faced with more opportunities to give and share, the children were much more generous after their character had been praised than after their actions had been. Praising their character helped them internalize it as part of their identities. The children learned who they were from observing their own actions: I am a helpful person. This dovetails with new research led by the psychologist Christopher J. Bryan, who finds that for moral behaviors, nouns work better than verbs. To get 3- to 6-year-olds to help with a task, rather than inviting them “to help,” it was 22 to 29 percent more effective to encourage them to “be a helper.” Cheating was cut in half when instead of, “Please don’t cheat,” participants were told, “Please don’t be a cheater.” When our actions become a reflection of our character, we lean more heavily toward the moral and generous choices. Over time it can become part of us.

Raising a Moral Child - NYTimes.com (via brutereason)

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Psychological Research

The Scientific Method

Scientific Method: The approach through which psychologists systematically acquire knowledge and understanding about behavior and other phenomena of interest.

Four main steps: identifying questions of interest, formulating an explanation, carrying out research designed to support or refute the explanation and communicating the findings.

Theories: Broad explanations and predictions concerning phenomena of interest.

Keep reading

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In no case should a collective community agreement or the consent of a community leader or other authority substitute for an individual’s informed consent.

Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights 19 October 2005 UNESCO Article 6 – Consent (via currentsinbiology)

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This is how we dehumanize poor and homeless people.

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The Meaning of Difference: Gender Theory, Postmodernism, and Psychology

The scientific model developed by Bacon was based on the distinction between “male” reason and its “female” opposites—passion, lust, and emotion (Keller, 1985). Because women were restricted to the private sphere, they did not have knowledge available in the public realm. When women had knowledge, as in witchcraft, their knowledge was disparaged or repudiated. As Keller points out, women's knowledge was associated with insatiable lust; men's knowledge was assumed to be chaste. In Bacon's model of science, nature was cast in the image of the female, to be subdued, subjected to the penetrating male gaze, and forced to yield up her secrets. Our purpose here is not to provide a critique of gender and science, which has been done elsewhere (cf. Keller, 1985; Merchant, 1980), but to draw attention to the long-standing association of women with nature and emotion, and men with their opposites, reason, technology, and civilization (Ortner, 1974).

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Neoliberalism got us so focused on individuals we forgot the system responsible for the actions of individuals.

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One is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it.

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (via syntheticphilosophy)

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Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.

(via ooevilynoo)

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In other words, research is not an innocent or distant academic exercise but an activity that has something at stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (via callowhill)

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The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. Just knowing that someone measured our ‘faculties’ by filling the skulls of our ancestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are.

Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, by Linda Tuhiwai Smith

a focus on ways research communities – the medical community, academia, anthropology – have exploited, misused, and marginalized others has kind of organically arisen this year. this book is intense, excellent, intensely excellent

(via livenudetella)

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NTAMW argues that there's no sexism in modern medicine because there's way more attention for breast cancer than for testicular cancer. I'm pretty sure he found the exception to prove the rule, and I'm also pretty sure it's only because breasts are hypersexualized to the point where a mastectomy is a woman's death sentence. Anyway, Viagra is standard fare but who really knows what vaginismus is?

I mean, just look at the way breast cancer funding is framed. “Save the boobs” or whatever, making the focus on the piece of flesh on the body, and not, y’know, the actual woman who has an awful disease which can be life-threatening. Also campaigns like those make women who have had their breasts removed because of treatment feel less like women. But I’m focusing too much on breast cancer in this response. I agree with this whole point, women are treated horrifically by the medical industry, and tend to never be believed when trying to get help about medical issues.

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At the time of the witch trials, capital and the State were particularly concerned with birth rates. They wanted labour and they saw large populations as the sign of a wealthy nation. The population was low due to the plagues and wars, and the authorities were worried about demographic collapse. Therefore they were anti-abortion and anti-contraception (the fairy tales of witches killing children and babies stem from this campaign). Many of the first witches burned were engaged in contraception and abortion work, and there is plenty of evidence that women were indeed controlling the birth rates within their communities during the middle ages. They authorities didn’t want to leave the control of reproduction in the hands of lower class women, and the witch trials were partly a battle to snatch control of this knowledge, which had previously been a ‘female mystery’. Women’s ability to control their own reproduction was hugely diminished; and as midwives and groups of women were excluded from the birth process, the communities were robbed of their traditions of knowledge. In so far as children are the products of women’s labour, control over reproduction meant alienating women from their own bodies and controlling how many children women had, and when and where they had them. In fact it would be another hundred years or more before the male doctors truly had a monopoly on attending births. In the seventeenth century, the surgeons started delivering babies using forceps, and women were banned from practicing surgery. By the eighteenth century most births were attended by physicians, and when female midwives in England organised and charged the male intruders with commercialism and dangerous misuse of the forceps, they were easily put down as ignorant ‘old wives’ clinging to the superstitions of the past. It was the process of the witch trials that had sown the seeds of this attitude. In the sixteenth century, midwives in France and Germany became obliged to report all births to the State, including concealed births. Today, it is illegal not to register births in most of Europe, while across the world there is currently significant control of reproduction by the authorities ranging from the Catholic prohibition on contraception and pregnancy terminations, to the state-run birth control programmes in China; and from enforced sterilisation in some export processing zones to the aborting of female foetuses in the patriarchal society of India. The extent to which birth is medicalised and seen in terms of risk, and the faith we have in the magic-seeming powers of the doctor and hospital (despite our frequent disappointments in the medical establishment) is still testimony to this battle.

Lady Stardust, Burning Women: The European Witch Hunts, Enclosure, and the Rise of Capitalism (via california-aries)

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Reminder that intersex people who underwent surgery against their will are wonderful, strong and no one ever had a right to change your body without your consent. Your body is your own and it’s beautiful in every state <3

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Tearoom Trade Study 1975

Men watched engaging in homosexual behaviour in public rest rooms

– Not aware that they were part of a study

The researcher Laud Humphreys pretended to be gay and offered to act as ‘lookout’ for the police. The encounters usually involved three people: the two engaged in sexual activity, and a look-out (‘watchqueen’). Humphreys was able to observe the activities of other participants.

Contact details obtained from license plates. 1 year later Humphreys showed up at their homes to interview the men on the pretext of it being a social health survey

– 54% of subjects were married. Because Humphreys was able to confirm that 54% were outwardly heterosexual men with unsuspecting wives at home, the study demonstrated the incongruity between the private self and the social self for many of the men engaging in this form of homosexual activity. Specifically, they put on a "breastplate of righteousness" (social and political conservatism) in an effort to conceal their deviation from social norms.

Many of the subjects were identifiable in Humphreys’ publications.

Criticised on ethical grounds in that he observed acts of homosexuality by masquerading as a voyeur, did not get his subjects’ consent, used their license plate numbers to track them down, and interviewed them in disguise without revealing the true intent of his studies (he claimed to be a health service interviewer, and asked them questions about their race, marital status, occupation etc). Privacy violations, and deceit - both in the initial setting, and in the follow-up interviews. 

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Nuremburg Trials 1946

War crimes trials were held at Nuremburg following WWII

As part of those trials, 23 Nazi physicians were prosecuted for research atrocities performed on prisoners of war.

Nuremberg Codes (1947) 10 principles 

As a result of the Nuremburg trials, a set of guidelines were published to guide ethical considerations in research: Principle 1. Voluntary consent  

Principle 2. Research should yield fruitful results for the good of society, and which cannot be obtained by other means  

Principles 3-8. These principles deal with minimizing the possibility of injury or harm coming to research subjects

Principle 9. Right of subjects to withdraw from study. Principle 10. Terminate study if continuation likely to lead to result in injury

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Research is the systematic and rigorous process of enquiry which aims to describe phenomena and to develop explanatory concepts and theories. Ultimately it aims to contribute to a scientific body of knowledge.

Bowling, 1997