Describe the ethical issues related to conducting research with children and prisoners.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

As you might imagine, there are special protections for certain segments of the population including children and individuals under some form of correctional supervision. Regardless of the study being conducted, research relying on both children and prisoners usually requires a full review by an IRB.
Research with Children: By regulatory definition, any person under 18 years old is considered to be a child and, as such, has not attained the legal age for consent to treatments and procedures involved in research. Generally, IRBs analyze the same considerations as they would for other research participants, including whether the research benefits gained are worth the risks involved. The issue of informed consent, however, must be handled differently as children cannot legal provide their own consent to participate in a study. To conduct research on children, active parental consent usually is required before the child can be approached directly about the research. In active consent, parents or guardians of a child being asked to participate in a study must sign a consent form. As you might imagine, adding this requirement to a research project can dramatically reduce participation because many parents simply do not bother to respond to mailed consent forms. For example, Sloboda and colleagues (2009) used an active consent procedure for gaining parental consent along with student assent: Parents and students both had to sign forms before the student could participate. The result was that only 58% of the 34,000 eligible seventh-grade students were enrolled in the study.
When Tricia Leakey and her colleagues (2004) were conducting research on a smoking prevention effort for middle school students, they were creative in getting parental consent forms returned. When the project began in the seventh grade, the researchers gave students project information and a consent card to take home to their parents. A pizza party was then held in every class where at least 90% of the students returned a signed consent card. In subsequent follow-ups in the eighth grade, a reminder letter was sent to parents whose children had previously participated. Classes with high participation rates also received a candy thank you. As you can see in Exhibit 3.9, the result was a very high rate of participation.
IRBs sometimes allow the use of a passive consent procedure—students can participate as long as their parents do not return a form indicating their lack of consent—which can result in much higher rates of participation. In fact, based on Article 12 of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCROC), which acknowledged that children are people who have a right to be heard, there has been an increased push for children to have their voices heard in research. Janis Carroll-Lind and her colleagues (2011) in New Zealand attempted just that when they surveyed children aged 9 to 13 years about their experiences with violence. They utilized a passive consent procedure that facilitated the right of children to report on their experiences of violence. To defend their use of this method, they stated,
The Ethics Committee carefully weighed and gave credence to the issue of children’s rights to protection and acknowledged and confirmed Article 12 of the UNCROC that grants children the right to speak on matters that concern them. Active consent could have compromised both of these rights. The view was held that protecting the rights of children was more important than parental rights to privacy regarding abuse in the home.
Research With Prisoners: Because individuals under the supervision of a correctional system are under constraints that could affect their ability to voluntarily consent to participate in research, there are also special protections for these populations. The U.S. DHHS has imposed strict limits on the involvement of prisoners as research subjects unless the research is material to their lives as prisoners. The term prisoner as defined by DHHS (Kiefer, 2015) is as follows:
A prisoner means any individual involuntarily confined or detained in a penal institution. The term is intended to encompass individuals sentenced to such an institution under criminal or civil statue, individuals detained in other facilities by virtue of statues or commitment procedures which provide alternatives to criminal prosecution or incarceration in a penal institution, and individuals detained pending arraignment, trial, or sentencing.
Included are those in hospitals or alcohol and drug treatment facilities under court order. Individuals in work-release programs and in at-home detention programs also qualify as prisoners. The definition applies to minors as well as to adults.
Although regulations restrict participation of prisoners to research that is material to their lives, this actually includes a great deal of research. For example, they can participate in research examining many issues including but not limited to the following: the possible causes, effects, and processes of incarceration and of criminal behavior; research on conditions particularly affecting prisoners as a class, such as research on diseases such as hepatitis and substance abuse; and all research that has the intent of improving their health and well-being.
Voluntary consent is an important issue with research involving prisoners. IRBs ensure that the decision to take part in research can have no effect on an inmate’s future treatment and/or parole decision. The use of incentives for prisoners is also judged differently compared to incentives for the general population. For example, while a $10 incentive to participate may not seem like a lot to someone not in prison, the maximum wage in many state prisons is only $1 per day, so a $10 incentive is a great deal indeed! In research one of the authors just completed on examining the factors related to desistance from substance abuse and crime, former inmates who were not currently under correctional supervision were given $100 to travel to the research office for a three-hour interview and those who were still in prison were provided $20 in their prison spending accounts (Bachman, Kerrison, O’Connell, & Paternoster, 2013). The IRB in this case deemed that the $100 would serve to unduly influence inmates to participate in the study, since it was comparable to five months’ pay in prison.
In sum, both research involving children and prisoners represent special cases for IRBs to consider when evaluating the benefits and potential harms of a study. Typically, when proposals come before IRBs that involve these special populations, there are special representatives in place who ensure their rights are protected.