Case Study Of Political Oppositional Research

1368 Words3 Pages

This paper is on a Harvard case study of Pat Parker, a lawyer who conducts political oppositional research and prepares reports. The work is done by contract between Parker and the candidate's campaign. The scenario is that Parker previously provided a report to a campaign, two years later; a group of lawyers who supported the candidate's opponent wants to buy the report plus other materials. The three parts of the paper include: the legal analysis, the ethical analysis and the recommendation for action. The paper considers contract law, copyright law, campaign statutes and codes of ethics. Bibliography lists 6 sources. Pat Parker conducts research grant applications (R01) to investigate ethical issues in human subjects research. The Code of Federal Regulations - Protection of Human Subjects (45 CFR, Part 46) provides a regulatory framework that all Parker-supported researchers must follow. Recent developments in biomedical and behavioral research, however, including the rapid growth of new interventions and technologies, increasing involvement of foreign populations in clinical research, and concerns about financial conflicts of interest among researchers, challenge investigators' abilities to interpret and apply the regulations (Buergenthal, 1995). Other situations (e.g., research with vulnerable populations, the use of data banks or archives, research on stigmatizing diseases or conditions) may present difficulties for identifying strategies, procedures, and/or techniques that will enhance/ensure the ethical involvement of human participants in research. The purpose of this program announcement is to solicit research addressing the ethical challenges of involving human participants in research in order to inform and optimize...

... middle of paper ...

...cal commitments and research purposes – ideally, with the thoughtful, informed discussion and guidance of the appropriate IRB. Parker recommendations and discussion should be seen precisely as the effort to propose methods and demonstrate their applications to a few specific instances - resulting in the recognition that more than one ethically-defensible response is possible. Hence Parker disagreements on specific issues are emphasized. But in this fashion, we hope that Parker work will help researchers, IRBs, and users develop ethical responses to their specific dilemmas in Political Research, especially as the distinctive characteristics of Political Research and its highly interdisciplinary character make it difficult to apply extant guidelines to these new contexts (Buergenthal, 1995). References Cunningham, Thomas J. Legal Aspects of Campus Unrest, June 1965.

Open Document