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ER2: Establishing Best Practices for Development Economics

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The Ethics of Sharing Results with Research Participants: Establishing Best Practices for Development Economics

This initiative aims to support the formation of new norms around local dissemination of research results at the end of RCTs and to advance new ethical standards for the sharing of research results to participants. Through an interdisciplinary, mixed methods participatory-social justice design, our research will elicit and value the voices of African participants. This three year process consists of surveying the field, collecting feedback from development economists and African participants, highlighting current norms, and sharing a Draft Proposed Best Practices document to initiate a wider conversation among development economists.

Motivation

In just under two decades, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have become a commonly accepted tool in development economics. In 2014, it was estimated that hundreds of RCTs had been carried out in the prior decade (Miguel et al. 2014). As of January 1, 2023, the American Economic Association’s registry of RCT pre-analysis plans listed 6,637 studies with locations in 164 countries. Despite the widespread adoption of RCTs, there has been very limited discussion about the ethical questions they raise when implemented at large scale. This has been particularly true of the topic of local results dissemination, and whether (and to what extent) there is an ethical or practical need to return RCT results to participants, in addition to publishing academic papers, research briefs, conference presentations, and other outputs that are standard for the field.

This project, funded by the National Science Foundation’s “Ethical and Responsible Research Program Area” (Award #2316205), aims to support the formation of new norms around local dissemination of research results at the end of RCTs and to advance new ethical standards for the sharing of research results to participants. Through an interdisciplinary, mixed methods participatory-social justice design, our research will elicit and value the voices of African participants. This three year process consists of surveying the field, collecting feedback from development economists and African participants, highlighting current norms, and sharing a Draft Proposed Best Practices document to initiate a wider conversation among development economists.

Activities

Year one’s objective (2024) is to document the practices and norms around the dissemination of results to research participants, within the context of development economics and related disciplines. The PI team will conduct an extensive literature review and will produce two academic articles, one conference presentation at a CEGA event, and one blog post.

Year two’s objective (2025) is to collect information from development economists running RCTs and East Africans participating in RCTs. We will gather qualitative and quantitative data about their experiences with, and expectations of, local dissemination of research results through 600 surveys (100 development economists; 500 African participants from 3 different RCTs in East Africa). We will also carry out an additional 120 semi-structured interviews (60 development economists and 60 African participants).

During the final year (2026), the PI team will create a Proposed Best Practices document to help initiate a wider conversation among development economists. We will also share results with all participants, and arrange multiple events to receive feedback on our results and the Proposed Best Practices document. The Proposed Best Practices will provide accessible, practical, and applicable recommendations that are responsive to the needs of both researchers and participants. We expect that the widespread sharing of the document among economists and African participants will be a starting point for a discipline-wide conversation, and that the Proposed Best Practices will initiate an iterative process of conversation, feedback, testing, sharing, and modification that will extend beyond this grant’s lifecycle.

Project Team

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