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This article provides a useful and perhaps not uncommon anecdote for researchers thinking about sharing professional expectations, scarce resources, "public good" aspects of academic inquiry, and professional responsibility. It appears as follows: Two sets of researchers, using a respected national longitudinal data set, have been working on related but distinct topics, employing mainly descriptive approaches in their research. In the interests of informing their own work, one group asked the other to share its paper. Reading it, they see that some findings look unrealistic at best, if not inaccurate. While continuing to work on their own paper, they attempt some replication. The numbers are, in fact, almost certainly wrong. The paper is soon to be published at a journal regularly read by both groups and many of their peers. The second group finds itself in a quandary. Convinced that the findings of the first team are erroneous, what, if any, actions should they take? What is the appropriate professional response, if any? In the current academic climate, replication of research is a highly visible issue, and this article presents a spirited discussion of possible solutions.

It appears that the practice of giving cash or gift vouchers to research participants is becoming increasingly common; however, this practice has received little attention from social researchers. Paying participants has implications in terms of the ethical requirement for consent and may have consequences in terms of recruitment for research projects and for the data collected. In this paper I consider how these issues arose in a research project with lone mothers and the way in which offering payments might help with gaining access to participants. I argue that the possible impact of making payments to research participants should be considered in research accounts and the possible impacts of payments should be more widely debated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There has been growing interest in the use of incentives to increase the uptake of health-related behaviours and achieve desired health outcomes at the individual and population level. However, the use of incentives remains controversial for ethical reasons. An area in which incentives have been not only proposed but used is HIV prevention, testing, treatment and care-each one representing an interconnecting step in the "HIV Cascade."Methods: The main objective of this qualitative case study was to document the experiences of health care and service providers tasked with administrating incentivized HIV testing, treatment, and care in British Columbia, Canada. A second objective was to explore the ethical and professional tensions that arise from the use of incentives as well as strategies used by providers to mitigate them. We conducted interviews with 25 providers and 6 key informants, which were analyzed using applied thematic analysis. We also collected documents and took field notes.Results: Our findings suggest that incentives target populations believed to pose the most risk to public health. As such, incentives are primarily used to close the gaps in the HIV Cascade by getting the "right populations" to test, start treatment, stay on treatment, and, most importantly, achieve (and sustain) viral suppression. Participants considered that incentives work because they "bring people through the door." However, they believed the effectiveness of incentives to be superficial, short-lived and one-dimensional-thus, failing to address underlying structural barriers to care and structural determinants of health. They also raised concerns about the unintended consequences of incentives and the strains they may put on the therapeutic relationship. They had developed strategies to mitigate the ensuing ethical and professional tensions and to make their work feel relational rather than transactional.Conclusions: We identify an urgent need to problematize the use of incentives as a part of the "HIV Cascade" agenda and interrogate the ethics of engaging in this practice from the perspective of health care and service providers. More broadly, we question the introduction of market logic into the realm of health care-an area of life previously not subject to monetary exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents several abstracts featured in various journals as of August 2006. "Creating the Public Domain: Nineteenth-Century Local State Formation in Britain and the U.S.," by Alan Digaetano; "The Significance of Color Declines: A Re-Analysis of Skin Tone Differentials in Post-Civil Rights America," by Aaron Gullickson; "Deconstructing the City of Culture: The Long-Term Cultural Legacies of Glasgow 1990," by Beatriz García.