Increased research literacy to facilitate community ownership of health research in low and middle income countries

ABSTRACT

The expansion of health research to low and middle income countries has increased the likelihood of exploitation and undue influence in economically vulnerable populations. In behavioral research, “reasonable availability”, which was originally developed for biomedical research and advocates for the equitable provision of any product developed during the research process, cannot always prevent exploitation. In such cases and settings, the informed consent process may lack cross-cultural validity and therapeutic misconceptions may arise. This article advocates for a mutual learning framework where international researchers can gain cultural competence while training and empowering local partners, increasing community ownership of health research.     

Prior belief and polarity in multicue learning.

We report two experiments in which participants are trained using a multicue probability learning (MCPL) task, which attempts to simulate the acquisition of expert judgement by experience in the real world. Participants were asked to predict performance in certain occupations given a profile of personality test results with trial-by-trial outcome feedback. Only some cues were relevant, and the polarity of the cues (positive or negative predictors) was unspecified. In addition, 25% of random noise was added to the feedback to simulate real world uncertainty. The main factor of interest was that the role of prior belief (determined in a separate study of stereotypes) interfered with the learning process. Experiment 1 failed to find any influence of prior belief in the cues that were irrelevant to the criterion being trained. However, in Experiment 2 people learned to use the relevant cues better when their effect conformed with rather than conflicted with prior belief Both experiments showed strong effects of cue polarity, with positive predictors much more easily learned. The results are discussed with reference to the cognitive processes involved in MCPL and closely related tasks.