Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the rise of the new “ethics culture” in the USA and Canada, there has been a noticeable decline in field research on new, controversial religions and social movements. This study examines some of the new administrative obstacles to research, as experienced by twelve researchers in the course of negotiations with their ethics boards (“REBs” in Canada, “IRBs” in the U.S.) for ethics approval regarding projects involving “human subjects”. The twelve informants’ critiques of their ethics committees, conveyed in interviews, fall into eight categories: (1) unnecessary delays; (2) poor communication skills; (3) excessive concern for potential risk; (4) impeding spontaneity and flexibility in field research; (5) secrecy, immunity and lack of accountability; (6) the hierarchical relationship; (7) REBs exceeding their mandate; (8) disregard for the well-being of human subjects. On the basis of these interviews (and previous studies), the strategic responses of North American researchers to obstacles posed by ethics committees might be analyzed as corresponding to four types: capitulation, adjustment, resistance and reform. While capitulation appears to be a common response among graduate students, resistance appears to be widely practised among experienced researchers, who cooperate deceptively through “benign fabrication” or “gamesmanship”. This study explores the implications of the rise of this rapidly evolving “moral bureaucracy”, criticized by scholars for inhibiting field research through the delaying or halting of research projects, distorting methodologies, and discouraging initiative and originality. Finally, it is argued that the ethical concern for potential harm to human subjects must be balanced with the right of minority groups to be heard; to tell “their side of the story”.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.050 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".