What do researchers do in an era of scarce research funding and difficult to find research subjects? Enlist their own children, of course! At least according to a New York Times piece reprinted in the Dallas Morning News, researchers are capitalizing on the fact that their kids are a captive audience to perform studies on them.

As the article explains,

“”You need subjects, and they’re hard to get,” said Deborah Linebarger, a developmental psychologist at the Children’s Media Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She has involved her four children in her studies of the effect of media on children.”

Most of the studies described in the article are totally innocuous–as most research with children meets the less than minimal risk standard. Studying children’s exposure to the media or putting them through a MRI machine isn’t too unreasonable, in my view. The question, of course, is whether Junior’s “datapoint” can be handled in an unbiased way. In most quantitative research, this would not be a problem; but for some qualitative studies, treating one’s child in an unbiased way or handling their data as such might be difficult. Moreover, what if the parent/researcher all of a sudden wanted to pull little Sally out of the study? Can we say conflict of interest?

Summer Johnson, PhD