Convenient Abusive Research

Comedian and filmmaker Woody Allen is often credited with having said that "Life is 90 percent showing up." In the introductory psychology class I took as a 1960s undergraduate, it was 5 percent. As is still a common practice at many research universities, students enrolled in the class were required to show up for a few hours of participation in a psychology research experiment. At least such participation makes sense in the context of those classes. As undergraduate students study how organisms respond to stimuli, rewards, and punishments, they also get to experience life as a lab rat. But over the years, the practice has grown in size and expanded to many other departments, making it a classroom constant way beyond a few course points in basic psychology. There exist a number of controls and government regulations for protecting the rights and welfare of human subjects of research, an administrative activity of usually unquestioned validity that some scholars claim is pushed to levels of overkill in an effort to make certain the people studied are not abused (Church 2002). Some universities, colleges, or academic departments have rules on who can access classes for research purposes. Yet even with these controls, the use of student subjects has grown by leaps and bounds in every discipline that studies consumers. Sometimes the research itself is part of the course learning experience. Sometimes a questionnaire has logical ties to the lecture materials. But students are increasingly subjects for other experiments in which the only "lesson" is that they learn to be frequent guinea pigs for the research whims of their teachers. The problem is not new. Years ago, I did it, too. As new doctoral students, we were each teaching a small section of the basic introductory advertising class. For the lectures on the generation of advertising ideas, my officemate provided a test of creative ability that the students answered and we then used as a springboard to discuss how advertising is written. The students' answers were used for our research, too, when we took the completed forms, compared the data with other information, and eventually, produced a journal article. But a week after we did the in-class exercise, one of the faculty members asked if we'd have the students fill out a questionnaire for his study. A day later, I got another request, then another. I say "request," but they were faculty and we were students, so our compliance was presumed. As a new teacher, a part of me felt relief in that it was a few minutes of lecture I didn't have to write. Yet by the third "request" I rebelled. I appealed to the department head, who stepped i n to write a policy limiting such faculty research access to classes and students. However, the desire was to limit pressures on the graduate teaching assistants, not to limit the potential exploitation of students in the course. And in the decades since then, the practice has grown. When I taught my first large-section introductory course in over a decade, I was amazed at how many requests came in from faculty and graduate students all over campus to use "just a few minutes at the start of class" to have students fill out surveys or respond to sample advertising messages. (All such requests were refused.) I heard from one teacher who, as he was making arrangements to leave town for a conference and have his class time covered, someone else in his college asked if he could step in to use this maybe-open period for an experiment with the hundreds of captive student subjects. It is not uncommon at any school for some faculty to ask to teach large section classes whenever they need a group of subjects to complete research questionnaires during the upcoming term. In extreme cases, students in danger of failing a course eagerly sign on for supposedly non-coercive extra credit research "experiences" to turn the F grade into a C. For the academic researcher, the modern large-sized classes make it convenient to gather more student subjects in a single sitting. …