Long read: Yale opioid study highlights ethical tightrope researchers walk to study addiction using deception
TORONTO -- A Yale study that found Canadian clinics were faster than the U.S. to provide opioid treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the ethical tightrope researchers must walk when studying addiction while using deception in their research gathering.
Joudrey said the study focused on the timeliness of methadone treatment options during the pandemic as “there's increasing evidence that the time it takes to get someone on a medication is crucial in terms of ensuring success and entering treatment. In other words, there's evidence that shows that delays in care, even as short as a day or two, can reduce how often people successfully enter care.
“This approach, which is sometimes called an audit study or a secret shopper study, has been used previously in addiction studies,” he said, adding that the study methods were submitted to the Yale Institutional Review Board and passed.
Schafer questioned why the researchers could not have called the clinics and asked about methadone appointment availability without the deception. When asked if the research team followed up with the clinics contacted in the study to disclose that they had in fact been deceived, Joudrey said no, as “it might cause more harm than good” for the clinics to find out they had been deceived, and as they did not collect any information on who had answered the phone, there was “no one to call back, in a sense.”
Joudrey said if the clinic didn’t answer within three tries the team would stop contacting them, and if there was a busy signal, the maximum amount of time they would stay on the line was capped at two minutes. Joudrey said because researchers were not gathering information on anyone working on the clinic who answered the phone, they could not be considered “a subject of the research” and therefore would not be considered “human subject research” and impact the ethical valuation of the study when it was before the review board.
Schafer said it is “discrediting” to university research, to social science research and corrodes the researchers and the people they employ to be deceptive.
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