Project Narrative This project will identify and reduce ethical and practical barriers to sharing qualitative research data. It will develop new resources to increase data sharing in an ethical manner, which will improve the quality of research data, facilitate new research in a cost-effective manner, and foster the training of new researchers.
PROJECT NARRATIVE The sickle cell trait (SCT) screening program of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is regarded as one of the largest mandated genetic screening programs in the United States (US). Estimates suggest that over 2,000 NCAA Division I student-athletes with SCT will be identified under the screening policy and that, without intervention, about seven NCAA Division I student-athletes would die suddenly from a complication of SCT over a 10-year period.
Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Archive, US Department of Energy (DOE) The United States Department of Energy (DOE), an integral partner to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the Human Genome Project, created the ELSI Archive to ensure future access to a variety of the ELSI materials it produced, such as ELSI articles in Human Genome News and a bibliography of ELSI publications produced prior to 1995.
Criminal DNA profiling could soon include phenotypic markers for attributes such as eye, skin, and hair color, gait, ancestry, and predisposition to behavioral traits such as smoking. This technology, referred to as forensic DNA phenotyping (FDP), transforms the existing function of criminal DNA profiling from confirming a suspect's identity to predicting it. The field of forensic genetics will have to confront the ethical and social challenges that FDP will raise.
American Indian and Alaska Natives (AIAN) face glaring health disparities, and AIAN-specific research lags behind other racial and ethnic data in addressing AIAN health concerns. Engaging AIAN community members in the research process can reduce research mistrust, increase scientific rigor, and expose more AIAN to research both as participants and potentially as future scholars. A significant barrier to community engaged research (CEnR), however, is the absence of culturally relevant human subject's research ethics education for community partners.
This project will identify and address ethical and practical barriers to qualitative data sharing (QDS) in health sciences research. Qualitative research has unique value in understanding health behaviors and traits that are stigmatized and hidden such as risk factors for HIV or a genetic propensity to addiction. Accordingly, a lot of qualitative data are sensitive, and the data are provided within relationships of trust.
As concerns for border security increase, policymakers are turning to genomics as a biometric for tracing individuals entering the country, identifying missing migrants' remains, processing refugee claims, and screening for human trafficking. Increasingly, genomic information is a part of legislation and policy as a universal and sustainable biometric. Genetic verification of claimed relationships is required for some refugees and proposed legislation would expand this practice.