Walther Joseph B
Department of Communication, Cornell University, 336 Kennedy Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4203, USA.
Ethics Inf Technol. 2002;4:205-16. doi: 10.1023/a:1021368426115.
As Internet resources are used more frequently for research on social and psychological behavior, concerns grow about whether characteristics of such research affect human subjects protections. Early efforts to address such concerns have done more to identify potential problems than to evaluate them or to seek solutions, leaving bodies charged with human subjects oversight in a quagmire. This article critiques some of these issues in light of the US Code of Federal Regulations' policies for the Protection of Human Subjects, and argues that some of the issues have no pertinence when examined in the context of common methodological approaches that previous commentators failed to consider. By separating applicable contexts from those that are not, and by identifying cases where subjects' characteristics are irrelevant and/or impossible to provide, oversight committees may be able to consider research applications more appropriately, and investigators may be less ethically bound to ascertain and demonstrate those characteristics.
随着互联网资源越来越频繁地用于社会和心理行为研究，人们越来越担心此类研究的特性是否会影响对人类受试者的保护。早期解决此类担忧的努力更多地是为了识别潜在问题，而不是评估这些问题或寻求解决方案，这让负责监督人类受试者的机构陷入了困境。本文根据美国联邦法规中关于保护人类受试者的政策，对其中一些问题进行了批判，并认为在以前的评论者未考虑的常见方法论方法的背景下审视时，其中一些问题并无相关性。通过区分适用的背景和不适用的背景，并识别受试者特征不相关和/或无法提供的情况，监督委员会或许能够更恰当地考虑研究申请，而研究人员在道德上也可能不必那么严格地去确定和证明这些特征。
