The troublesome semantics of conflict of interest

The sensible response to conflicts of interest is impaired by misconceptions and sloppy usage of terminology. Apparent and potential are widely misused modifiers for conflicts. Excessive legislative focus on financial interests limits understanding of the scope and significance of researchers' conflicts of interest. There is no moral or ethical failing in having a conflict of interest; the problem occurs when conflicts are not disclosed appropriately and when conflicts are allowed to bias research, teaching, or practice. Avoidance and prevention should be applied to bias, not conflicts.     

An introduction to research ethics

Practical issues throughout scientific research can be found to have an ethical aspect. There is a gray area in which scientific error (“honest error”) may be difficult to distinguish from unacceptably poor research practice or an unethical failure to follow scientific norms. Further, there is no clear margin between deceptive practices which are widely accepted and those which must be considered fraudulent. Practical problems arise in matters of data management and presentation, authorship, publication practices, “grantsmanship”, and rights of research trainees, as well as the well-recognized areas of human and animal experimentation. Beyond the gray areas, the legal definition of research misconduct is discussed in relation to research fraud, and the latest proposed definition of the Commission on Research Integrity is briefly reviewed. It is noted that the standards of ethical research are changing. Finally, there is a comment on the idea of institutional integrity in research, and the critical role of the mentor in transmitting research standards to the next generation.     

Completion norms collected from younger and older adults for 198 sentence contexts

Completion responses were collected from younger and older adults for 198 highly constrained sentence contexts that were designed to elicit the same response (i.e., the best completion) in the vast majority of subjects. For each context, completions and their respective frequency of occurrence are provided. Overall, individuals of all ages produced highly similar terminal words. Results of formal analyses indicated that greater socioeconomic status and higher levels of education were mildly associated with a greater probability of producing a best completion response. Although increasing age also correlated with greater probability of producing a best completion, this very weak association would not preclude use of these stimuli with a wide age range.     

Family,peer, and neighborhood influences on academic achievement among African-American adolescents: One-year prospective effects

Using a 1-year prospective design, this study examined the influence of family status variables (family income, parental education, family structure), parenting variables (maternal support and restrictive control), peer support, and neighborhood risk on the school performance of 120 African American junior high school students. In addition to main effects of these variables, neighborhood risk was examined as a moderator of the effects of parenting and peer support. Family status variables were not predictive of adolescent school performance as indexed by self-reported grade point average. Maternal support at Time 1 was prospectively related to adolescent grades at Time 2. Neighborhood risk was related to lower grades, while peer support predicted better grades in the prospective analyses. Neighborhood risk also moderated the effects of maternal restrictive control and peer support on adolescent grades in prospective analyses. These findings highlight the importance of an ecological approach to the problem of academic underachievement within the African American community.     

Ethical issues in research on preventing HIV infection among injecting drug users

The ethical issues in conducting research on preventing HIV infection are among the most complex of any area of human subjects research. This article is an update of a 1987 article that addressed potential conflicts between research design and ethics with respect to AIDS prevention among injecting drug users. The present article reviews current ethical issues that arise in the design and conduct of HIV/AIDS prevention research focused on injecting drug users. Disclaimer: The content of this publication is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the Beth Israel Medical Center or Johns Hopkins University.     

Scientist-administrators at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development as contributors to the scientific enterprise

At the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), as in other government research supporting agencies, scientist-administrators who are "program staff" work to accomplish their organization's set of research priorities using established mechanisms for supporting research. At the same time, the definition of their work is given to their interpretation, which, in turn, is guided by their understanding of their scientific discipline and their commitment to it. The tension that may arise between the organization-guided role and the science-guided role is more apparent than real because the major responsibility of "program staff" within the Institute is to cultivate a grant portfolio addressing scientific issues relevant to the mission of the Institute and exemplifying the most advanced research concepts and methodologies. When the overlap between the mission of the Institute and the direction of science is small, the push to increase it leads to new and imaginative solutions that benefit both the Institute and the science.     

Models of integration given multiple sources of information

Several models of information integration are developed and analyzed within the context of a proto-typical pattern-recognition task. The central concerns are whether the models prescribe maximally efficient (optimal) integration and to what extent the models are psychologically valid. Evaluation, integration, and decision processes are specified for each model. Important features are whether evaluation is noisy, whether integration follows Bayes's theorem, and whether decision consists of a criterion rule or a relative goodness rule. Simulations of the models and predictions of the results by the same models are carried out to provide a measure of identifiability or the extent to which the models can be distinguished from one another. The models are also contrasted against empirical results from tasks with 2 and 4 response alternatives and with graded responses.