hwitteman.bsky.social
Professor & Canada Research Chair in Human-Centred Digital Health at Université Laval in Québec City, PhD human factors engineering, #T1D since 1983, 💙 DIY looping #WeAreNotWaiting, En/Fr
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By @sabivm.bsky.social
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It’s comforting to know this happens in both directions. One of my personal faves has always been the urgent email in English claiming to be from my institution’s IT department, who would never, ever—not in a million years—send me an email in English.
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Ugh. It’s just horrible. I’m so sorry.
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You can feel free to share my response with your research ethics committee or board.
Bonne journée,
Sincerely,
Holly
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I am generally happy to participate in studies like yours when I have the option to either remain anonymous or have my contributions be attributed to me. Such an approach respects the autonomy and choice of interviewees.
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Conversely, when you want to interview people who have published on a topic, there is good reason to believe that they may prefer to receive credit for their ideas.
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In studies of experiences of a health condition, there is good reason to believe that participants may not want their personal health information published alongside their name. That’s why conventions exist to keep interviews confidential.
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These kinds of studies are fundamentally different from studies about, for example, people’s experiences of a health condition.
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Moreover, I suspect that academics who belong to minoritized groups are more likely to participate in these kinds of studies. If that is true, it means that their expertise is being used without credit being assigned to them, which contributes to unequal status in academia.
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Hello,
I don’t participate in studies that ask for my expertise and yet keep the interviews anonymized and confidential.
Expertise is currency in academia. A study that collects and uses expertise without attributing it to the expert is ethically questionable, in my view.
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An email response I sent tonight, with boilerplate I now include as a response to all such requests:
Re: Invitation to take part in an interview as expert
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This happened to me early in my career, hence my strong feelings against this practice.
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When you interview me about a topic to which I have devoted my career and ask for my best ideas, I actually want to credited for them. I do not want to later see them reproduced word for word in your high impact paper without my name attached.
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Oof. This is going to cause a lot of damage—to research groups and most importantly, to people with health problems.
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Also, ministers understandably want to put their own stamp on things and be seen to be doing a lot, which can have pros & cons.
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Chrétien never had a science minister and even reduced industry & science to just industry, and that’s when we got CIHR, budgets+ & 30-40% success rates. I know his brother in his ear helped, but still, I don’t think having a minister of science determines TriCouncil budgets.
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Yeah, I’m not convinced having a minister gets the results we might want. Canada more funding for research. We don’t need a ministry for that to happen. If anything, I think it’s more productive to just allocate funds to the funding orgs, step back, and let peer review work.
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Agreed it’s largely provincial but there are still key responsibilities that fall under federal purview.
I don’t think the background of the minister guarantees/prevents CIHR budget increases/decreases.
Which MP with a science background would you suggest instead?
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A background in social & organizational psych sounds like a good background for a Minister of Health to me. Especially considering the workforce problems across Canada.
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6/6 I hope the person with the health crisis is ok, and I hope the woman next to me made it in time to see her mom one last time. ❤️
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5/Everyone sat and waited as the flight attendants helped the person in crisis get from the back to the front of the plane. Perhaps we all agreed that someone else’s life is more important than our hopes to make our next flights. It was a small moment of solidarity and community.
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4/Upon landing, the flight crew requested that everyone wait a bit longer so that the person with the health crisis could exit the plane first and be seen by a medical team awaiting.
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3/During the flight, a passenger had a medical crisis. The flight crew asked for a health professional, and a person from business class helped the passenger in crisis.
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2/I came home to Quebec City from a meeting in Winnipeg, connecting in Montreal. The first flight was delayed ~90 min. Many passengers, myself included, were anxious about missing their connections. The woman next to me had to catch her flight to Rome to see her mother one last time before she died.
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Also, one of my best experiences ever was when I found myself headed overseas without a charging cord for my glucometer. Some extremely kind staff at the iStore in YUL dug out an old charger for a set of speakers they used to sell, and gave it to me. 💙
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One of the best things I ever did was to make myself a travel checklist of diabetes supplies. I divide it into sections: insulin, ketones, BG sensing & testing, pump & supplies, lows, charging cords & batteries, etc.
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Also thinking: this is a good example for students of one of the many reasons we don’t look at data before pre-defined analysis points.
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Those days are tough. So sorry. I hope it levels out soon!
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Yes, definitely. I trust that people know how to spell their name! :) And we were able to correct typos.
It’s just the deal when people fill out web forms.