International Collaborations in Behavioral and Social Sciences Report of a Workshop (2008) / Chapter Skim
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2 Obstacles to International Collaborations
2 Obstacles to International Collaborations
Pages 11-23
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From page 11... ...
Judith Torney-Purta (University of Maryland, College Park) has led a collaborative project involving education researchers investigating civic and political engagement among young people in 29 countries through the International Association for the Evaluation of Education Achievement (IEA, the large research consortium described in Chapter 1)
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From page 12... ...
Their concerns were not only for the sake of the research project being completed but also for future research collaborations. Longitudinal research endeavors or trend studies will not succeed if collaborators feel slighted or excluded or if the studied population feels used or ignored.
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From page 13... ...
has conducted research on the moral development of children in Canada and China. In preparing for the research with his Chinese colleagues, Helwig found little reticence regarding investigation into children's understanding and attitudes toward democracy, autonomy, and rights at the abstract level.
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From page 14... ...
That setting may lack any ethics review board, requiring the formation of such an entity. In summary, the first phase of most international research collaborations will take longer, be more complex, and consume more time and resources than most domestic or non-collaborative projects.
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From page 15... ...
Communications across national, cultural, or professional boundaries can be further complicated by asymmetries of power that occur when investigators from different nations attempt to collaborate. Fons van de Vijver (Tilburg University)
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From page 16... ...
It was in terms of IRBs that workshop participants discussed this aspect of the difficulties of undertaking international research collaborations. The Belmont Report of 1979 summarizes the basic ethical principles identified by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research.
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From page 17... ...
Second, the NAS report suggests that IRBs give insufficient attention to increasing threats to the confidentiality of research data due to technological changes, especially computer storage of supposedly confidential data that might be viewed by unauthorized individuals. A third problem is that the IRB review process may delay research or weaken research designs without necessarily improving the protection of human subjects, because the type of review is not commensurate with the risk involved.
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From page 18... ...
When it began, large-scale developmental research was unprecedented in Romania and there were no regular established boards for conducting ethics reviews. In addition to shepherding approval for the project through the relevant IRBs of the home institutions of the several project investigators, BEIP had to organize and coordinate reviews from local commissions on child protection in Bucharest, the Romanian Ministry of Health, and the Institute of Maternal and Child Health, as well as obtain input from nongovernmental organizations.
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From page 19... ...
institutions, overly long, legalistic, and ultimately inappropriate in the Romanian context. In order that the consent obtained be truly informed, the local research collaborators drafted shorter, more explicit consent forms that addressed the concerns of Romanian parents.
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From page 20... ...
" The issue of the appropriateness and scope of IRB reviews is certainly not a problem unique to international research, but it is one that the large majority of workshop participants believe requires urgent attention. DATA MANAGEMENT Creating and managing international datasets presents another series of challenges.
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From page 21... ...
While identical measurements are optimal, researchers may be able to find ways to overcome modest differences in the measurement of related constructs using modern scaling methods. Given the unique work that can be accomplished using large longitudinal datasets, Huesmann sees an insistence on exactly identical measures as itself an impediment to some international research collaborations.
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From page 22... ...
While data are increasingly used in secondary data analysis, research projects typically are not designed or reported with this purpose in mind. As Van de Vijver lamented, "We are better at standardizing test administration than in standardizing data storage." PUBLICATION AND DISSEMINATION Publishing the results of international studies can be more time consuming than for domestic projects, as it will entail revising manuscripts not only across languages and distances but also across different styles of professional and academic writing and etiquette regarding order of authorship.
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From page 23... ...
In summary, the numerous tasks involved in the formation and conduct of international collaborative projects extend their scope well beyond that of many domestic projects. Substantial differences will arise within a diverse research team, from relatively benign but sometimes problematic variations in practice to significant asymmetries of power between researchers from countries with different levels of research resources.
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