SECTION ON LAW & ETHICS
Director: David Festinger, Ph.D.
Current Projects
HIV/AIDS Drug Use and Vulnerable Populations in U.S.: David Festinger, Ph.D. and David Metzger, Ph.D. TRI is evaluating the efficacy of a brief, computerized HIV risk reduction intervention with drug court populations. Findings will provide useful information on the utility of a strategy for reducing HIV risk in substance-using offenders, and could have major implications for expanding the focus of drug courts and other community-based correctional programs beyond reducing criminal recidivism and drug use.
Improving the Ethics of Research: Development of the Coercion Assessment Scale: Karen Dugosh, Ph.D. In this NIDA-funded project, a Coercion Assessment Scale (CAS) is being developed and evaluated, responding to the need for an instrument to accurately measure perceptions of coercion among substance abusing criminal justice clients participating in research. Much like consent quizzes and tests of cognitive functioning, the CAS will be useful for identifying individuals who are not appropriate for research participation or who need enhanced consent procedures because of their level of perceived coercion. In this context, the CAS may be particularly useful to research staff, research intermediaries, and ethics review boards.
Adaptive Services in Drug Court: Douglas B. Marlowe, J.D., Ph.D. and David S. Festinger, Ph.D. This study extends a line of health-services research aimed at adapting services in drug courts to the needs of drug-abusing offenders. The current study is examining the incremental utility gained by re-adjusting the dosage of both court hearings and clinical case-management sessions in response to participants’ on-going performance in the program. Consenting misdemeanor drug court participants will be randomly assigned at entry to the full adaptive intervention or to baseline-matching only. It is hypothesized that participants in the adaptive condition will graduate at a significantly higher rate, provide fewer drug-positive urines and have fewer re-arrests than participants in the baseline-matching only condition.
Incentivized Consent in Drug Court: David S. Festinger, Ph.D., Kimberly C. Kirby, Ph.D., and Karen Dugosh, Ph.D. This study extends the work of Dr. Festinger and TRI’s section on Law & Ethics on improving the ethics of informed consent to participate in research studies. Participants are randomly assigned to either a (1) combined corrected feedback and incentivized consent procedure or (2) consent as usual control group. The combined condition is hypothesized to result in greater consent recall and may lead to mastery of the information because it addresses both cognitive limitations in the population as well as motivation to learn the consent material. Findings will be helpful in developing enhanced procedures for protecting the autonomy and human subject protections of vulnerable populations entering research.
