Developing Distress Protocols for Research on Sensitive Topics
Section snippets
The study
The research project is a qualitative study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The aim of the study was to develop a theoretical framework that describes, explains, and predicts how dating violence unfolds during adolescence. The project is being conducted by a collaborative team of university- and community-based researchers. The research team includes five investigators (three university-based nurse researchers, the executive director of a domestic violence/rape
Relevant ethical issues
The research team deliberated on several ethical issues that were raised during the development of the protocol. The three broad principles of ethical research identified in the Belmont Report of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (Department of Health, Education, & Welfare, 1979) served as a basis for these deliberations. The three principles are autonomy, beneficence (and nonmaleficence), and justice (Barnbaum & Byron, 2001).
Screening Interview and Distress Protocol
The screening interview and distress protocol is presented in Figure 1. This protocol is being used by research associates who conduct telephone screening interviews.
The aim of the telephone screening is to screen out individuals for whom participation in the research interview would be too risky. Because the funding agency asked for a detailed protocol for this screening, we sought to clarify our original exclusion criteria and provide a clearer plan for assessing these criteria. We rejected
Discussion
We found the task of developing detailed distress protocols time consuming and, at times, trying. We discovered, as did Newman and Kaloupek (2004), that “all researchers must accommodate individual differences in risk-benefit perspectives when constructing study procedures…but they often lack a reliable point of reference for decisions about how to do so” (p. 383). We had to operationalize some decisions that had been previously based on the research associate's unarticulated clinical
Acknowledgment
Research was funded by the CDC, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (Donna Martsolf, principal investigator, 1RO1CE001183-01).
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