Cost, Utility, and Judgments of Institutional Review Boards

Abstract

Recently, Psychological Science published a series of articles on the interplay of ethics and scientific quality in psychological research (Parkinson, 1994, Pomerantz, 1994, Rosenthal, 1994, Sears, 1994) In the first of these, Rosenthal (1994) argued that the ethical and scientific quality of such research are in fact inextricably linked His case was logically tethered to a cost/utility ratio analysis of research Because all research carries with it some expenditure of resources (“cost”), the conduct of research possessing little scientific merit (and thus, presumably, little “utility”) cannot be justified