Sharing Results with Research Participants: Establishing Ethical Practices for Development Economics

An increasing amount of economics research makes use of randomized control trials (RCTs), where research participants are randomly assigned to a control or experimental group. There are ethical challenges relating to the use of RCTs in economics, including how to explain research findings to participants appropriately once a study ends. This project will document existing RCT practices, identify ethical and practical obligations, and support the formation of new norms around sharing research results with local communities. The project will include in-depth reviews of existing research protocols to establish current practices. In addition, it will implement interviews with development economists and local communities to create a best practices guide to initiate conversations between researchers and research participants. The project will result in a series of research and educational outputs centered on changing the norms around the sharing of results with research participants. The project focuses on the use of RCTs to collect data in the field of development economics. The research team has three aims. The first aim is to document current practices for disseminating research findings in economics and related social science disciplines. The second aim is to gather perspectives from economists and research participants regarding the experiences with RCTs. The team will collect quantitative and qualitative data by conducting surveys and interviews with development economists and research participants. The third aim is to develop a best practices guide that will be openly shared through several strategies including publications and at conferences. This project is jointly funded through the ER2 program by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences and the Office of International Science and Engineering. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.