Peregrine Schwartz-Shea

Reforming Institutional Review Board Policy: Issues in Implementation and Field Research

Political science as a discipline has largely ignored research regulatory policies associated with institutional review boards (IRBs). Many political scientists-especially those in the senior ranks-are either oblivious to the existence of IRBs or actively decide to sidestep them by not submitting their proposals for review. Based on research conducted since 2004, we hold that APSA members at all ranks of the profession, along with political scientists worldwide, need to be concerned, not to say alarmed, about IRB policy. Why this sense of urgency, and why now? Copyright

Empowering Women: Self, Autonomy, and Responsibility

iberal feminism is under attack from socialist, radical, and t essentialist feminists, who argue that liberal feminism cannot advance the feminist cause &dquo;save in a very limited sense&dquo; (Evans 1986: 103). As feminists who believe we must struggle against the systemic subordination of women in public and domestic spheres, and as supporters of a liberal civic order structured by the rule of law, constitutionally limited government, private property, and the legal and moral tradition of individualism, we argue that there is a great need for a revitalized liberal feminism. In this article, we redefine a concept central to liberal feminist theory-the concept of empowerment. We explore the foundations of women’s powerlessness in the domestic sphere, suggesting that women can move from powerlessness to empowerment by reclaiming the stories of their lives. We argue that this enlarged understanding of empowerment leads us to rethink the core liberal

Adapting Clicker Technology to Diversity Courses: New Research Insights

Diversity courses present many challenges to instructors, but foremost among these is student resentment of the material and theoretical approaches. Clickers exhibit several features making them potentially useful in diversity courses. Specifically, clickers provide opportunities for students to anonymously register their opinions on contentious social issues (“opinion polling”) as well as their difficulty with course material (“content polling”). While existing literature documents the value of clickers for content polling, there is little research on opinion polling and none on their use in diversity courses. This comparative case study is an exploratory investigation of the value of clicker use in two political science diversity courses. Student and instructor perspectives were gathered using several approaches, including an open-ended feedback form, a questionnaire, TA-instructor interviews, and a database of clicker polls. Findings support the value to student learning of both opinion and content polling. Also supported is clicker use to empower shy students, to encourage class attendance, and to help adapt lectures to student needs. Clickers contributed to an open classroom climate (an important feature in diversity courses), but their impact depends on an instructors pedagogical approach. Of particular interest, the anonymity feature of clickers elicited considerable debate among students and the instructors.

Perestroika ten years after: Reflections on methodological diversity

One of the primary concerns driving Perestroika was the hegemony of quantitative methods in American political science research, curricula, journals, and positions, to the exclusion of qualitative and interpretive approaches. In this article, we assess the contemporary methodological diversity of U.S. political science, at the APSA in particular, to see what, if anything, has changed over the last 10 years. This is an admittedly rough assessment, as the deadline for this symposium did not allow time to repeat the research projects that started Perestroikas and our own solo and joint efforts, the latter preceding and then intersecting with the former. We therefore give a broad overview of methods-directed activities, although we cannot help but see events through the lens of our own involvement in them, and that view is perforce partial. Copyright

Theorizing Gender for Experimental Game Theory: Experiments with “Sex Status” and “Merit Status” in an Asymmetric Game

In experimental game-theoretic research, to the extent that sex has been considered at all, the approach has been to focus on the individual level of analysis. This paper reports the results of experiments designed to focus on sex/gender and to expand the level of analysis to include the institutional level. An asymmetric game was designed such that players in the “male” and “female” institutional locations had 3 and 2 alternatives, respectively. Players earned the institutional locations based on a test, so that top and bottom scorers respectively “merited” the 3- and 2-alternatives locations. Game-theoretic understandings of sex-of-player were compared to the expectations states theory concept of “sex status”; that is, men expect and are expected to perform more competently than women. Results indicated that top-scorer men and women behave similarly; bottom-scorer men “resist” their low merit status (behaving the most “rationally” of all player groups); bottom-scorer women “accept” their low merit status (behaving the most “irrationally” of all player groups). Whereas game theory cannot provide a coherent understanding of these findings, the concept of sex status helps to interpret the behavior of all four player groups and shows how judgments about “rationality” and “irrationality” depend critically on the interpretive framework used.

The Challenge of Recruiting Women and Minority Faculty Members in Political Science: A Case Study in Methods

teria; (case settled 1984). Garber v. Saxon Business Products, 552 F.2d 1032 (4th Cir. 1977). Munford v. James T. Barnes Co., 441 F. Supp. 459 (E. D. Mich. 1977). Priest v. Rotary, (USDC N. Calif.) 1983 (32 FEP cases 1064). Tomkins v. Public Service Electric and Gas Co., 568 F.2d 1044 (3rd Cir. 1977). Toscanov v. Nimmo, (USDC D Del.), 1983 (32 FEP cases 1401). Williams v. Saxbe, 413 F. Supp. 654, 660 (DDC 1976). Wright v. Methodist Youth Services, Inc. (USDC Del), 1981, (25 FEP Cases 563).

Encountering your IRB 2.0 : What political scientists need to know

This essay corrects and updates one that was originally published in Qualitative & Multi-Method Research and, in a condensed version, in three other APSA Organized Section newsletters. Our research into IRB policy has shown that many political scientists are not familiar with some of its key provisions. The intent of the essay is to increase awareness of the existing policys impact on political scientific research and, in particular, on graduate students and junior faculty. We remain concerned that at present, faculty are leaving discussions of research ethics to IRBs (and their counterparts worldwide), whereas these Boards largely focus on complying with the regulatory details of governmental policy. Even though this essay seeks to clarify the latter, we remain convinced that research ethics ought to be vigorously taken up within disciplinary and departmental conversations.

The Methods Café: An Innovative Idea for Methods Teaching at Conference Meetings

Interpretive research methods of various sorts have long been used to study “the political,” but the full range of such methods is not widely known, and many are curious about what they entail. Others, who begin to use one or another of them, have questions about how to proceed. For those just learning about these methods, questions may be as basic as: “What does ethnomethodology mean?” “What is semiotic analysis?” “Are these approaches recognized as legitimate in political science?” Scholars engaging, or perhaps teaching, these methods might ask, e.g., “How do ethnographers overcome problems of accessing their field site, talking to strangers, and turning a years worth of observational and interview notes into concise text?” We thank 2005 and 2006 Program Chairs Ron Schmidt and Val Martinez-Ebers and Executive Director Betty Moulds and Associate Director Elsa Favila at the Western Political Science Association, and Qualitative Methods 2006 Section Program Chairs Julia Lynch and Melani Cammett, and Michael Brintnall, Rob Hauck, Christina Marmor, and others on the conference organizing staff at APSA. Michael and Rob came to the Cafe at the Western in 2006 to see for themselves what it was that we were trying to do. We are grateful for their help in making it possible at APSA. And, of course, we thank all those colleagues who have contributed their time and thought to creating the Cafe with us, including Cecelia Lynch, who saw right at the beginning that it was a ‘cafe’ and came up with its definitive name.

Book Review: Health Advocacy Inc.: How pharmaceutical funding changed the breast cancer movementBattS., (2017). Health Advocacy Inc.: How pharmaceutical funding changed the breast cancer movement. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press, 383 pp. CAD

In Health Advocacy Inc., Sharon Batt examines the world of breast cancer activism in Canada beginning in 1989 through to the contemporary period. She draws on her own experiences as a patient, an activist, and a journalist and, as important, she conducts 45 interviews, examines myriad documents, and familiarizes herself with the technical debates on drug effects and clinical trials. These rich sources are interpreted in terms of a careful recounting of the historical context of Canadian health care policy and by use of theoretical resources from Bourdieu to science and technology studies. The result is a persuasive portrait of the policy arena of drug regulation that connects the larger, shifting policy context (from the welfare state to neoliberalism) to the heartfelt struggles of activists trying to do the right thing. There is much on which to comment in this impressive book. Broadly, readers will find evidence and theorizing for thinking about the following kinds of questions: How and when does policy change occur? What kinds of policy actors are most influential and why? Is the full array of possible alternatives for problem mitigation fully considered (and by whom)? Is it discourse or dollars that matters most in understanding policy change? How do donor identities and dollars affect nonprofit organizational missions? What role can (and should) critique play in democratic policy making? Is corporate social responsibility to be trusted? Are there institutional structures that can generate resources for activism that do not blunt critiques of either government policy or corporate conduct? For the readers of Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics (JERHRE), three themes seem most pertinent—research ethics, the ethics of funding, and policy design. On research ethics, the book offers two points of entrée— decision making in clinical trials and Batt’s own practices. In clinical trials, the effects of treatment on those enrolled in control/experimental groups are monitored over time. If it appears an experimental drug is effective, the study is stopped prematurely to offer it to those in the control group, a practice known as using a “surrogate endpoint;” that practice contrasts with the use of a “true endpoint,” that is, longer-term evidence on “improved overall survival and/or quality of life” (p. 224). As Batt discusses, this is no small technical point because it relates directly to whether a new drug actually extends life for breast cancer patients or, possibly, shortens their lives; use of surrogate endpoints increases uncertainty about drug effects. Unfortunately, it appears that “most parties to a clinical trial perversely benefit from the early-stopping practice”; these parties include medical journals, funding agencies, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and ill patients desperate to take a chance on an experimental treatment (p. 225). This situation is a classic ethical and regulatory dilemma. Should doctorresearchers treat the patients in front of them, even if they lack solid information about a drug’s safety and effectiveness, or continue a study to develop reliable information that will benefit future patients? What Batt skillfully demonstrates is that the Canadian regulatory system was once focused on drug safety. Several factors produced a turn toward drug access over safety—AIDS activism, trade policy, and pharmaceutical donations to breast cancer activist groups that lobby for that access. The result? In one of her case studies, Batt shows that one breast cancer advocacy group ended up drawing attention to a drug that ultimately killed patients sooner rather than increasing their survival time. As importantly, the turn in the system discouraged activist groups from asking a broader array of questions about alternative patient treatments such as “restrictions on carcinogenic environmental toxins, exercise programs adapted to their needs, better emotional supports, home care, and palliative care” (p. 291). Batt’s analysis supports a return to prioritizing drug safety over speedier access. However, the now entrenched practice of using a “surrogate endpoint,” intended to improve and accelerate participants’ access to new treatments, appears to be an obstacle to that broader policy goal. For those teaching research ethics to graduate students in the social sciences, Batt’s book provides a model of how to represent research practices when one has been personally involved in the topic of a study. Notably, Batt does not simply claim that she is being “fair” and “unbiased”; instead, and preferably, she enacts her ethics in her writing: She lays bare her positionality through targeted use of “I” (e.g., in 761726 JREXXX10.1177/1556264618761726Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics book-review2018

39.95 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-7748-3384-4

Experimental approaches to political science research have become increasingly prominent in the discipline. Experimental research is regularly featured in some of the discipline’s top journals, and indeed in 2014 a new Journal of Experimental Political Science was created, published by Cambridge University Press. At the same time, there are disagreements among political scientists about the limits of experimental research, the ethical challenges associated with this research, and the general model of social scientific inquiry underlying much experimental research. Field Experiments and Their Critics: Essays on the Uses and Abuses of Experimentation in the Social Sciences , edited by Dawn Langan Teele (Yale University Press 2015), brings together many interesting perspectives on these issues. And so we have invited a number of political scientists to comment on the book, the issues it raises, and the more general question of “the uses and abuses of experimentation in the social sciences.”