Developing an Ethics and Society Review for Research

制定研究伦理与社会审查

• 批准号: 2124734
• 负责人: Margaret Levi
• 金额: $ 39.95万
• 依托单位: Stanford University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-08-01 至 2024-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2124734&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Developing; Ethics; Society; Review; Research

With the advent of new technologies and methodologies, academic research has been routinely criticized for its negative impacts on society. We lack adequate institutional responses to this responsibility: the crux of the criticism of such research often falls outside the purview of existing research mechanisms such as the Institutional Review Board (IRB), which are designed to evaluate harms to human subjects rather than harms to human society. In response, we are developing the Ethics and Society Review (ESR), a feedback panel that works with researchers to mitigate negative ethical and societal aspects of research. The ESR's main insight is to serve as a requirement for funding: researchers cannot receive grant funding from major funding programs at our university until the researchers complete the ESR process for the proposal. In this proposal we describe a new set of institutional arrangements: the Ethics and Society Review (ESR). The goals of the ESR are to: (1) design a process that involves ethicists, social scientists and technologists in providing productive feedback to research projects at their proposal stage; (2) integrate that process as a requirement to receive funds from three major on-campus grant-giving institute; (3) gather evidence from grant PIs and ESR panelists as to the effectiveness of the process for changing researchers attitudes and behaviors toward research ethics.For many researchers, the task of considering the broad ethical and societal effects of their research, outside of research participants, is foreign. Therefore, our first objective is to develop improved guidelines for researchers and ESR panelists to reflect on the ethical and societal impacts of proposed research. To do this, we will utilize a combination of additional literature reviews, process feedback from the pilot program survey and interviews, and PIs’ own experience. Our second objective is to use the learnings from our pilot program to design and implement a revised version of the ESR at three on-campus funding organizations. The deployment of the program will occur over three years, during which time we will collect data on the ESR process for our evaluation.Our third and final objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of individual components of the ESR as well as its ability to engender cultural change within existing institutional structures around ethics in research. To do this, we will use a stepped wedge trial design (SWT). This objective will allow the ESR to determine the effect each aspect of the ESR process has on researchers’ attitudes and behaviors regarding ethics. With that information, we will be able to further improve the ESR process and promote the ESR as a mechanism for cultural change around this topic.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

随着新技术和方法的发展，学术研究对于其对社会的负面影响通常至关重要。我们缺乏对这一责任的足够的制度回应：此类研究的关键症的症结通常不在现有研究机制的权限之外，例如机构审查委员会（IRB），这些机制旨在评估对人类受试者的危害而不是对人类社会的危害。作为回应，我们正在开发伦理与社会评论（ESR），这是一个反馈面板，与研究人员合作，以减轻研究的负面伦理和社会方面。 ESR的主要见解是作为资金的要求：在研究人员完成该提案的ESR流程之前，研究人员无法从我们大学的主要资金计划中获得赠款。在此提案中，我们描述了一系列新的制度安排：《伦理与社会评论》（ESR）。 ESR的目标是：（1）设计一个涉及伦理学家，社会科学家和技术人员在其提案阶段提供产品反馈的过程； （2）将该过程整合为从三个主要的校园赠款机构获得资金的要求； （3）从Grant PIS和ESR小组成员那里收集证据表明，改变研究人员的过程的有效性是针对研究道德的行为。对于许多研究人员来说，考虑研究参与者以外的研究的广泛道德和社会影响的任务是外国人。因此，我们的第一个目标是为研究人员和ESR小组成员制定改进的准则，以反思拟议研究的道德和社会影响。为此，我们将利用其他文献综述，试点计划调查和访谈的过程反馈以及PIS自己的经验组合。我们的第二个目标是使用我们的试点计划中的学习来设计和实施三个校园资金组织的ESR修订版。该计划的部署将在三年内进行，在此期间，我们将收集有关ESR流程的数据进行评估。我们的第三个也是最后的目标是评估ESR各个组成部分的有效性，以及其在研究中围绕道德的现有机构结构内引起文化变革的能力。为此，我们将使用阶梯楔试验设计（SWT）。该目标将使ESR能够确定ESR过程对研究人员的参加和伦理行为的影响。有了这些信息，我们将能够进一步改善ESR流程并促进ESR作为围绕该主题的文化变革的一种机制。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并使用基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响审查标准，通过评估被认为是宝贵的支持。