Paying participants in research with healthy volunteers.
First version: Justin Williams, Chair CERB, August ’10.
Second version: Justin Williams, Chair CERB, May 2011.
Note: these are guidelines only. The College Ethics Board will make the final
decision as to what is appropriate.
Paying healthy volunteers to participate in research is widespread practice in both
medical and non-medical research. The following is designed to aid ethics committee
members in coming to a view about what is acceptable in terms of payment. It
should be seen as guidance to be interpreted in accordance with specific case.
In research where there is a health risk, this raises the concern that participants
might put themselves at risk in order to relieve financial hardship. It is possible that
promise of a financial reward may discourage participants from disclosing conditions
that may lead to their exclusion from a study. For example, in a study requiring
physical exertion, the promise of financial reward may discourage disclosure by
someone with a history of cardiac problems.
In some research, participant involvement can be highly demanding of time. If this is
well compensated, such involvement can prove lucrative. Potentially, the amount of
compensation has the potential to give research participants the incentive to
participate at a cost to other activities such as personal studies.
Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that participation in research may cause
participants significant inconvenience and suffering as well as incurring expenses.
This may involve subjecting them to unpleasant procedures such as those involved in
obtaining blood or other tissue samples, or simply by asking them to give long
periods of time to perform mundane and repetitive tasks. Ideally, participants should
volunteer to participate completely of their own free will but to request individuals
to voluntarily submit themselves to inconvenience and suffering without financial
compensation may not only be unrealistic, but may result in biased sampling of the
population towards those individuals who are either more altruistic or available.
Financial compensation may therefore be required on occasions, to ensure
appropriate recruitment of participants. An important distinction to be made here, is
between incentive and compensation. The Ethics Board will be required to ensure
that participants are appropriately compensated but that payments do not
constitute an incentive that places participants at risk of either health or social
problems.

Where there is clearly no risk to the participants’ well-being from the
research, there is not a moral problem with providing incentives to
participate. But this should be considered in the widest sense. For example, it
would be inappropriate for a student to become distracted from his or her
studies through giving excessive time to participating in research. Also, the
potential of incentives to bias the sample and affect the validity of a study
should be considered.

Where there are any potential health risks (even if they are small and only
potentially present for a very small minority of participants), it is important
that payment must not be offered in any way to act as an incentive. In this
situation it must not be part of the initial advertisement and should only be
described in the information sheet. Furthermore, it should not be overly
great. It might correspond to an acceptable wage for unskilled labour.
However, if unpleasant procedures are involved, further compensation for
this is acceptable.

For children and young people, or other vulnerable groups, where small sums
of money may be perceived as having grater value than for adults, and longterm risks are underestimated, special caution should be exercised. It is
preferable in these groups for compensation to be offered in material (nonmonetary) terms, or at least with gift vouchers.

In the case of participation in a study being conditional upon the absence of
any health problem, the consent form must include a signed statement to the
effect that participants have read the exclusion criteria and do not meet
them.

It is important that researchers should be sensitive in the way that they offer
payment. Recruitment advertisements should not state the amount of
compensation being provided.

A prize-draw is technically an incentive, though usually only a very small one
and only offered when the research is free of any significant risk. In these
cases it is acceptable to mention it in an advertisement.