Faculty Achievements - Dr. Celia Fisher chairs SRCD policy committee

The Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, or “Common Rule”, provides the basis for Institutional Review Boards, such as the one at Fordham University, to evaluate research involving infants, children, and adolescents.  It was last revised in 1991 in a time when most research was conducted in universities, colleges, and medical institutions and took place at a single site.

Dr. Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D.

The United States Department of Health and Human Services is proposing to update the Common Rule policies in response to ambiguities in the current framework highlighted by the expansion of human subject research into other disciplines and an increase in multi-site studies.  Any changes to these policies would have a significant impact on institutional research in the social and behavioral sciences involving minors.

Dr. Celia Fisher has recently served as the chairperson of a task force convened by the Society for Research and Child Development (SRCD) charged with the creation of a report that ensures that any proposed changes to the “Common Rules” serve the interests of and do not present barriers to the responsible conduct of socio-behavioral research.  The resulting report, “Preserving and Enhancing the Responsible Conduct of Research Involving Children and Youth - A Response to Proposed Changes in Federal Regulations” provides recommendations to policy makers for ensuring the responsible conduct of child and adolescent research in whatever final regulatory changes are enacted.

In this report, Dr. Fisher and her colleagues note that the regulations as currently specified in the “Common Rule” were originally created with biomedical research in mind and that the application of these policies to social and behavioral research has created barriers to conducting research with children and youth.  

The complete report can be obtained from the SRCD web site.
 
Resources

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services - Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects ('Common Rule')

Social Policy Report - “Preserving and Enhancing the Responsible Conduct of Research Involving Children and Youth: A Response to Proposed Changes in Federal Regulations” (PDF)

News Release - HHS announces proposal to improve rules protecting human research subjects

The Research Colloquium Series presents: Elke Weber, Ph.D.

Elke Weber, Ph.D.

On Wednesday, April 10th, Elke Weber, Ph.D. (Jerome A Chazen Professor of International Business Director, Center for Research on Environmental Decisions Director, Center for the Decision Sciences Columbia Business School), will be presenting for the Psychology Department's Research Colloquium Series.

Her presentation is titled "Query Theory - Knowing what we want by arguing with ourselves".

Psychologists and behavioral economists agree that many of our preferences are constructed, rather than innate or pre-computed and stored. Little research, however, has explored the implications that established facts about human attention and memory have when people marshal evidence for their decisions. This talk provides an introduction to Query Theory, a psychological process model of preference construction that explains a broad range of phenomena in individual choice with important personal and social consequences, including our reluctance to change and excessive impatience when asked to delay consumption.

This presentation will take place on the Rose Hill Campus in Walsh Library's Freeman Hall. All university students are welcome.

Faculty Achievements - Dr. Fred Wertz

Fred Wertz, Ph.D.

Dr. Fred Wertz was recently elected to the executive board of the American Psychological Association Division 5--Measurement, Statistics, and Evaluation as representative of the Section for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology.

Dr. Wertz has recently published a book on qualitative data analysis entitled, “Five Ways of Doing Qualitative Analysis” (Guilford/2011).

Dr. Wertz is also currently president of the Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists. In 2014, he is slated to receive the Society for Humanistic Psychology’s Rollo May Award for independent and outstanding pursuits of new frontiers in humanistic psychology.

A selection of Dr. Wertz’s published works can be found listed on his faculty Web page and in Fordham University’s research repository “DigitalResearch@fordham.edu”