What if the incentives are too big or too small? Does it matter, and what impact might it have? How do we know what is appropriate?
If experience tells us that large or excessive incentives will help recruit/retain participants in high risk research, should we worry about the ethical issues of providing these incentives?
Whatever the case may be regarding incentives, some such as the Overseas Development Institute—admittedly in relation to enriching policy with research in developing countries—argue that researchers must become policy entrepreneurs who can: (i) operate in highly political environments; (ii) distill powerful policy messages from research results; (iii) use networks, hubs, and partnerships and build coalitions to work effectively with all stakeholders; and (iv) maintain long-term programs that pull all these together. For this, the research units they belong to must have intent—they must know what they want and truly want that, which includes: (i) a clear policy objective; (ii) focused research; (iii) more communications that include simple, concrete, credible, and emotional stories; (iv) the right incentives (yes, the locus of this question, in direct relation to which one should say that incentives need not be exclusively pecuniary); and (v) the right systems. The Overseas Development Institute goes further by saying that researchers must equip themselves with skills and become: (i) engineers; (ii) fixers; (iii) networkers; and even (iv) storytellers, this in multidisciplinary teams with others who possess the needed skills. (Enriching Policy with Research, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254583216_Enriching_Policy_with_Research, may be of tangential interest.)
Article Enriching Policy with Research
Resp. Mr. Brown,
One needs the motivation to conduct the research, in fact, to begin research an individual should have strong motivation. This incentive could be available in monetary terms or physical future projects and its implications or from your family or to gain prestige in the society. But if analyzed philosophically, one can conduct research for the sake of research and not to attain or gain any kind of incentives.
Lets say we have 1) a survey study, and 2) a study of a vaccine safety. Should we be worried about offering too high/too low incentives for recruitment/retention of participants for either case?
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