BackgroundThe role of consent for research use of health information is contentious. Most discussion has focused on when project-specific consent may be waived but, recently, a broader range of consent options has been entertained, including broad opt-in for multiple studies with restrictions and notification with opt-out. We sought to elicit public values in this matter and to work toward an agreement about a common approach to consent for use of personal information for health research through deliberative public dialogues.MethodsWe conducted seven (...) day-long public dialogues, involving 98 participants across Canada. Immediately before and after each dialogue, participants completed a fixed-response questionnaire rating individuals' support for 3 approaches to consent in the abstract and their consent choices for 5 health research scenarios using personal information. They also rated how confident different safeguards made them feel that their information was being used responsibly.ResultsBroad opt-in consent for use of personal information garnered the greatest support in the abstract. When presented with specific research scenarios, no one approach to consent predominated. When profit was introduced into the scenarios, consent choices shifted toward greater control over use. Despite lively and constructive dialogues, and considerable shifting in opinion at the individual level, at the end of the day, there was no substantive aggregate movement in opinion. Personal controls were among the most commonly cited approaches to improving people's confidence in the responsible use of their information for research.ConclusionBecause no one approach to consent satisfied even a simple majority of dialogue participants and the importance placed on personal controls, a mechanism should be developed for documenting consent choice for different types of research, including ways for individuals to check who has accessed their medical record for purposes other than clinical care. This could be done, for example, through a web-based patient portal to their electronic health record. Researchers and policy makers should continue to engage the public to promote greater public understanding of the research process and to look for feasible alternatives to existing approaches to project-specific consent for observational research. (shrink)

BackgroundStigma refers to a distinguishing personal trait that is perceived as or actually is physically, socially, or psychologically disadvantageous. Little is known about the opinion of those who have more or less stigmatizing health conditions regarding the need for consent for use of their personal information for health research.MethodsWe surveyed the opinions of people 18 years and older with seven health conditions. Participants were drawn from: physicians' offices and clinics in southern Ontario; and from a cross-Canada marketing panel of individuals (...) with the target health conditions. For each of five research scenarios presented, respondents chose one of five consent choices: (1) no need for me to know; (2) notice with opt-out; (3) broad opt-in; (4) project-specific permission; and (5) this information should not be used. Consent choices were regressed onto: demographics; health condition; and attitude measures of privacy, disclosure concern, and the benefits of health research. We conducted focus groups to discuss possible reasons for observed consent choices.ResultsWe observed substantial variation in the control that people wish to have over use of their personal information for research. However, consent choice profiles were similar across health conditions, possibly due to sampling bias. Research involving profit or requiring linkage of health information with income, education, or occupation were associated with more restrictive consent choices. People were more willing to link their health information with biological samples than with information about their income, occupation, or education.ConclusionsThe heterogeneity in consent choices suggests individuals should be offered some choice in use of their information for different types of health research, even if limited to selectively opting-out. Some of the implementation challenges could be designed into the interoperable electronic health record. However, many questions remain, including how best to capture the opinions of those who are more privacy sensitive. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have long been concerned with privileged women’s activism and engagement with feminist politics and how acts of resistance from privileged subjects might best be understood. In the current moment, we are seeing a reinvigoration of interest in feminist activism particularly from young women, but not necessarily focusing on young women who are positioned as privileged. Simultaneously, there is attention in the sociology of elite schooling to the question of social justice politics in privileged spaces. In this article, we (...) contribute to both of these scholarly conversations by reporting on the feminist activism of three young women attending an elite school in Australia. We argue that these young women’s activism/feminist politics need to be understood as a complex entanglement of resistance and reproduction with regard to gender, race and class, and that drawing on recent theorisations influenced by post-humanism in feminist educational research produces fresh insights into researching gender/race/class reproduction by young women in elite educational settings. (shrink)

This paper addresses John Burgess's answer to the ‘Benacerraf Problem’: How could we come justifiably to believe anything implying that there are numbers, given that it does not make sense to ascribe location or causal powers to numbers? Burgess responds that we should look at how mathematicians come to accept: There are prime numbers greater than 1010 That, according to Burgess, is how one can come justifiably to believe something implying that there are numbers. This paper investigates what lies behind (...) Burgess's answer and ends up as a rebuttal to Burgess's reasoning. (shrink)

Young women’s identities are an issue of public and academic interest across a number of western nations at the present time. This book explores how young women attending an elite school for girls understand and construct ‘empowerment’. It investigates the extent to which, and the ways in which, their constructions of empowerment and identity work to overturn, or resist, key regulations and normative expectations for girls in post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultural contexts. The book provides a succinct overview of feminist theorisations of (...) normative femininities in young women’s lives in western cultural contexts. It includes familiar sexist discourses such as sexual double standards, as well as more recent commentary about the regulation of young women’s subjectivities in neoliberal, post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultures. Drawing on ethnographic research in the context of an elite girls’ secondary school, the author explores how empowerment for young women is constructed and understood across a range of textual practices. From visual representations of young women in school promotional material, to students’ constructions of popular celebrities, the question of how girls’ resistance to normative femininities begins to develop is examined. This rich empirical work makes a unique contribution to the study of elite schooling within the sociology of education, drawing on important insights from the field of critical girlhood studies, and posing a challenge to popular feminist notions about media literacy, young women and empowerment. It will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the areas of gender studies, sociology, education, youth studies and cultural studies. (shrink)

Building on their important findings in The Source of the River, the authors now probe even more deeply into minority underachievement at the college level. Taming the River examines the academic and social dynamics of different ethnic groups during the first two years of college. Focusing on racial differences in academic performance, the book identifies the causes of students' divergent grades and levels of personal satisfaction with their institutions. Using survey data collected from twenty-eight selective colleges and universities, Taming the (...) River considers all facets of student life, including who students date, what fields they major in, which sports they play, and how they perceive their own social and economic backgrounds. The book explores how black and Latino students experience pressures stemming from campus racial climate and "stereotype threat"--when students underperform because of anxieties tied to existing negative stereotypes. Describing the relationship between grade performance and stereotype threat, the book shows how this link is reinforced by institutional practices of affirmative action. The authors also indicate that when certain variables are controlled, minority students earn the same grades, express the same college satisfaction, and remain in school at the same rates as white students. A powerful look at how educational policies unfold in America's universities, Taming the River sheds light on the social and racial factors influencing student success. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that the human visual system can detect a face and elicit a saccadic eye movement toward it very efficiently compared to other categories of visual stimuli. In the first experiment, we tested the influence of facial expressions on fast face detection using a saccadic choice task. Face‐vehicle pairs were simultaneously presented and participants were asked to saccade toward the target (the face or the vehicle). We observed that saccades toward faces were initiated faster, and more often (...) in the correct direction, than saccades toward vehicles, regardless of the facial expressions (happy, fearful, or neutral). We also observed that saccade endpoints on face images were lower when the face was happy and higher when it was neutral. In the second experiment, we explicitly tested the detection of facial expressions. We used a saccadic choice task with emotional‐neutral pairs of faces and participants were asked to saccade toward the emotional (happy or fearful) or the neutral face. Participants were faster when they were asked to saccade toward the emotional face. They also made fewer errors, especially when the emotional face was happy. Using computational modeling, we showed that this happy face advantage can, at least partly, be explained by perceptual factors. Also, saccade endpoints were lower when the target was happy than when it was fearful. Overall, we suggest that there is no automatic prioritization of emotional faces, at least for saccades with short latencies, but that salient local face features can automatically attract attention. (shrink)

The paper discusses Dr. Floris Tomasini's paper “What Is Bioethics: Notes toward a New Approach?”. Based on Tomasini's account of methodological and ethical pluralism, the paper explores the demarcation problem of bioethics and suggests a full methodological laissez-faire.