Research Participants Should Be Rewarded Rather than “Compensated for Time and Burdens”

In their article Holly Fernandez Lynch and colleagues (2020) defend (and elaborate further) a framework for ethical payment for research participants originally developed by Luke Gelinas et al. (2018). The framework divides all ethically acceptable research payments into three functional categories of reimbursement, compensation, and incentives, and focuses on fairness and adequate recruitment as counterweights to concerns about undue inducement and loss of public trust. While I fully agree with the authors’ assumption that an adequate conceptual and ethical framework that clearly distinguishes research payments according to their roles, is crucial for addressing fundamental concerns regarding the payment (its fairness and impact on the informed consent process) as well as for providing IRBs and investigators with a practical tool for designing and evaluating offers of payments, I do not share their opinion that the framework created by Gelinas et al. provides a long-time wished for “systematic approach for both specifying and justifying those offers” (Fernandez Lynch et. al. 2020: XX). I claim that the framework is both descriptively and normatively faulty. It fails to adequately distinguish and conceptualize different functional categories of payment to research participants and it does not always provide good reasons for paying or not paying research participants. Due to the space limitations, I focus on – what the authors call – “compensation for time and burdens”. I show that this category of payment is ill-defined and insufficiently justified.