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Socializing the Gut in Probiotics Experimentation: Calibrating Microbiota and Science Policy
Author(s) -
Gruber David R.,
Kalin Jason
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
world medical and health policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.326
H-Index - 11
ISSN - 1948-4682
DOI - 10.1002/wmh3.325
Subject(s) - normative , psychology , anxiety , feeling , positive deviance , happiness , affect (linguistics) , qualitative research , mental health , applied psychology , clinical psychology , social psychology , psychotherapist , psychiatry , sociology , social science , philosophy , communication , epistemology
Prebiotic and probiotic products continue to experience strong consumer growth while gastroenterological researchers work behind the scenes to understand the effects of specific bacterial strains on study participants’ feelings of mind‐body healthfulness. Correlations are achieved through the use of psychometric questionnaires, which aim to measure affect states like stress, anxiety, and depression. In this paper, we turn to qualitative textual analysis to examine two commonly employed psychometric questionnaires (HAM‐D and HADS) used in studies of the same probiotic formulation. We show how concepts of social deviance and norms of behavior (e.g., sleep patterns, social life, and work productivity) inform such questionnaires, thus inserting normative ethical imperatives into clinical findings. After demonstrating several key disjunctions across these questionnaires, we develop recommendations for gastroenterological researchers. In particular, we recommend that researchers give more focused attention to aligning psychometric questionnaires and more carefully enact their qualitative assessment requirements. In like manner, we recommend that ethical reviewers and science policy reviewers consider how psychometric questionnaires embed social assumptions into clinical trials, which can affect determinations of healthfulness.