Let me start by saying that I understand the necessity of ethics review boards, and different policies at play to ensure the safety/fair treatment of participants and researchers. While I won't argue with the importance of ERBs, I will say that it saddens me that many, many research initiatives will never come to fruition simply because they don't receive funding, or they don't align with various institutional/political goals.
With all of that being said, I'm often overwhelmed with the notion that a lot
of really interesting research projects will never be done because of
these rules and policies. As part of my undergrad, I completed a major in psychology. Needless to say, psychology is a field full of incredibly interesting experiments and research involving humans as participants. ERBs are particularly important in this field, as there is a history of experiments that have been done that would never pass ethics approval. However, there are some studies that I wish could be done, that I know never will be. As a long standing example, I've always been intrigued by the fact that babies a have the ability to perceive and discriminate between every human speech sound. They quickly lose this ability as there is repeated exposure to certain phonemes present in the languages spoken around them. Every since I learned these facts, I've wished that there was an experiment that could be conducted to see what would happen if a newborn was consistently exposed to many different languages (I'm thinking like, 50 languages) - how much of their ability to perceive and discriminate would be retained over time? Alas, I know that this type of experiment would never be approved, so I'm left to merely wonder.
Ling, that is a really interesting question! I'm trying to think back to my Language Development class at Ryerson to see if I remember a similar discussion ever being brought up it in. I'm sure it was, but it escapes me.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that policies around ethics can potentially stop a great research project from happening. However, as students we also see the affects they have on our learning. For example, we are limited to who we can talk to and how we can approach questions in some situations because our class hasn't been approved by the school to undergo certain aspects of a project. In one of my iSchool classes, we were not allowed to directly meet with a group of people to conduct an interview because our class had not been approved to do so. What I can say, however, is in certain situations where ethics is not approved, you can sometimes make an educated guess from other similar research. In the case of babies learning and discriminating between languages, unless the baby was in a lab where the only contact it ever had was with people during the experiment, it is likely that they have a parent (mom) whose language they are exposed to more. Babies also begin to understand sounds from in the womb so even then they would be hearing their mom's voice. In this case, my educated guess would be although they might be familiar with different sounds and possibly be better equipped to hear the different sounds as they get older after constant exposure, they will still have the strongest understanding of their mom's language because they were most exposed to it and exposed to it first (assuming they were raised by the same person who birthed them). Again, just an educated guess!