50 research outputs found
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A randomized trial of a lab-embedded discourse intervention to improve research ethics.
We report a randomized trial of a research ethics training intervention designed to enhance ethics communication in university science and engineering laboratories, focusing specifically on authorship and data management. The intervention is a project-based research ethics curriculum that was designed to enhance the ability of science and engineering research laboratory members to engage in reason giving and interpersonal communication necessary for ethical practice. The randomized trial was fielded in active faculty-led laboratories at two US research-intensive institutions. Here, we show that laboratory members perceived improvements in the quality of discourse on research ethics within their laboratories and enhanced awareness of the relevance and reasons for that discourse for their work as measured by a survey administered over 4 mo after the intervention. This training represents a paradigm shift compared with more typical module-based or classroom ethics instruction that is divorced from the everyday workflow and practices within laboratories and is designed to cultivate a campus culture of ethical science and engineering research in the very work settings where laboratory members interact
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Flexible Estimation of Policy Preferences for Witnesses in Committee Hearings
Abstract:
Theoretical expectations regarding communication patterns between legislators and outside agents, such as lobbyists, agency officials, or policy experts, often depend on the relationship between legislators’ and agents’ preferences. However, legislators and nonelected outside agents evaluate the merits of policies using distinct criteria and considerations. We develop a measurement method that flexibly estimates the policy preferences for a class of outside agents—witnesses in committee hearings—separate from that of legislators’ and compute their preference distance across the two dimensions. In our application to Medicare hearings, we find that legislators in the U.S. Congress heavily condition their questioning of witnesses on preference distance, showing that legislators tend to seek policy information from like-minded experts in committee hearings. We do not find this result using a conventional measurement placing both actors on one dimension. The contrast in results lends support for the construct validity of our proposed preference measures
The Necessity of Construct and External Validity for Generalized Causal Claims
The Credibility Revolution advances quantitative research designs intended to identify causal effects from observed data. The ensuing emphasis on internal validity however has enabled the neglect of construct and external validity. This article develops a framework we call causal specification. The framework formally demonstrates the joint necessity of assumptions regarding internal, construct and external validity for causal generalization. Indeed, the lack of any of the three types of validity undermines the Credibility Revolution's own goal to understand causality deductively. Without assumptions regarding construct validity, one cannot accurately label the cause or outcome. Without assumptions regarding external validity, one cannot label the conditions enabling the cause to have an effect. These assumptions ultimately are founded on qualitative and theoretical understandings of a causal process. As a result, causal specification clarifies the central role of qualitative research in underwriting deductive understandings of causality in quantitative research
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Friends, brokers, and transitivity: Who informs whom in Washington politics?
Why and how do groups share information in politics? Most studies of information exchange in politics focus on individual-level attributes and implicitly assume that communication between any two policy actors is independent of the larger communication network in which they are embedded. We develop a theory stating that the decision of any lobbyist to inform another lobbyist is heavily conditioned upon their mutual relationships to third par-ties. We analyze over 40,000 dyadic relationships among lobbyists, government agencies, and congressional staff using sociometric data gathered in the 1970s health and energy policy domains. The results cohere with recent findings that lobbyists disproportionately inform those with similar preferences and show in addition that political communication is transitive: holding constant the degree of preference similarity, a lobbyist is more likely to communicate with another lobbyist if their relationship is brokered by a third party