Epistemic Strategies in Ethical Review: REB Members’ Experiences of Assessing Probable Impacts of Research for Human Subjects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research ethics boards (REBs) are charged with applying ethical standards to protect the rights and interests of research subjects. Little, however, is known about how REB members perceive probable impacts of research participation for subjects. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 40 Canadian REB members, we identify three frequently reported epistemic strategies, including reliance on a local REB culture or ethos, use of resident authorities, and protective imagination. Far less commonly described strategies included direct or indirect contact with research subjects. REB members also reflected upon significant gaps in their knowledge and thus the importance of knowing what we don’t know. Recommendations arising from this support an evidence-based practice for ethics review involving clear epistemic standards for REBs learning about subjects’ experiences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Metaresearch Domain: Methods · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | low |
| gpt | Metaresearch Domain: Methods · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | medium |
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 | 0.177 | 0.350 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.023 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
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".