Speculating on precarious income: finance cultures and the risky strategies of healthy volunteers in clinical drug trials

Fisher, Jill A.; Wood, Megan M.; Monahan, Torin

doi:10.1080/17530350.2020.1850504

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…From enrolling in one to two clinical trials per year, healthy volunteers can expect to earn ~$4,000, and even with extensive screening for new studies, it is unusual for someone to earn more than $10,000 annually from trial enrollment [ 15 ]. Thus, participation in the clinical trial enterprise should not be seen as an endeavor that will lead individuals to financial solvency [ 3 , 30 , 31 ]. Indeed, because any single Phase I trial is unlikely to transform healthy individuals’ economic stability in the longer term, many enroll simply to mitigate against financial crisis [ 32 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Healthy volunteers in US phase I clinical trials: Sociodemographic characteristics and participation over time

Kalbaugh

McManus

et al. 2021

PLoS ONE

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Background Increasing the diversity of research participants is an important focus of clinical trials. However, little is known regarding who enrolls as healthy volunteers in Phase I clinical trials, which test the safety and tolerability of investigational new drugs. Despite the risk, healthy volunteers can derive no medical benefit from their participation, and they are financially compensated for enrolling. Objective This study’s purpose is to describe sociodemographic characteristics and clinical trial participation histories of healthy people who enroll in US Phase I trials. Methods The HealthyVOICES Project (HVP) is a longitudinal study of healthy individuals who have enrolled in Phase I trials. We describe self-reported sociodemographic information and Phase I trial history from HVP recruitment (May-December 2013) through the project’s end three years later (December 2016). Trial experiences are presented as medians and quartiles. Results The HVP included 178 participants. Nearly three-fourths of participants were male, and two-thirds were classified as racial and ethnic minorities. We found that some groups of participants were more likely to have completed a greater number of clinical trials over a longer timeframe than others. Those groups included participants who were male, Black, Hispanic, 30-39-years-old, unemployed, had received vocational training in a trade, or had annual household incomes of less than $25,000. Additionally, the greater the number of clinical trials participants had completed, the more likely they were to continue screening for new trials over the course of three years. Participants who pursued clinical trials as a full-time job participated in the greatest number of trials and were the most likely to continuing screening over time. Implications Participation as a healthy volunteer in US Phase I trials is driven by social inequalities. Disadvantaged groups tend to participate in a greater number of clinical trials and participate longer than more privileged groups.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Healthy volunteers in US phase I clinical trials: Sociodemographic characteristics and participation over time

Kalbaugh

McManus

et al. 2021

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

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“…Reflecting on this current capitalist condition, it is unsurprising that research participants expect compensation for their time, as each moment in time can be activated for income-generating purposes (Fisher et al, 2021; Warnock et al, 2022). When time becomes speculative (Adkins, 2020), each period given to an activity simultaneously prevents more lucrative activities from occurring.…”

Section: The Precarious and Productive Participantmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, time becomes a calculative asset to the individual who must determine which opportunity best contributes to their livelihood. This speculative time is no more apparent than in the case of clinical trial participation discussed earlier, where self-proclaimed ‘professional guinea pigs’ optimise their time to access the most lucrative trials, often turning down lower-paying trials speculating on the potential of a better trial becoming available (Fisher et al, 2021). Fisher et al (2021: 470) argue that this speculation is often based on the fiction that they can predict whether a new clinical trial might come up, but in reality, these participants operate within a ‘field of unknowns’.…”

Section: The Precarious and Productive Participantmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This speculative time is no more apparent than in the case of clinical trial participation discussed earlier, where self-proclaimed ‘professional guinea pigs’ optimise their time to access the most lucrative trials, often turning down lower-paying trials speculating on the potential of a better trial becoming available (Fisher et al, 2021). Fisher et al (2021: 470) argue that this speculation is often based on the fiction that they can predict whether a new clinical trial might come up, but in reality, these participants operate within a ‘field of unknowns’. Beyond deciding to forgo one trial for another, some participants will disregard mandatory washout periods between trials to make themselves available for new trial openings (Monahan and Fisher, 2015).…”

Section: The Precarious and Productive Participantmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Precarious Participants, Online Labour Platforms and the Academic Mode of Production: Examining Gigified Research Participation

McKenzie

2023

Critical Sociology

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In an economic environment defined by precarious and gig-based labour contracts, academic research has been reimagined as a source of income for research participants. In addition, with the rise of online labour platforms, researchers have turned to online labour platforms as a solution to the increasing difficulty in recruitment of participants in research. This present context makes explicit the hidden labour that research participants have always done in the production of research outputs within academia. This paper develops a Marxist lens through which we can understand the material conditions of the circulation of capital through academia and the role of research participants in this mode of production. By developing this broad analytical framework for the academic mode of production, this paper further argues that our present economic epoch of the gig economy and specifically the use of digital labour platforms for academic research, has accelerated the subsumption of research participation as a source of income through the fragmentation of work and the gigification of everyday life.

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“…Waldby and Cooper push against this sequestration of research participation from labour, through articulating a labour theory of value for clinical labour, which they regard as a crucial element of bioproduction (see also Waldby & Cooper, 2008). Their interest in thinking research participation as a mode of work is shared with those such as Jill Fisher (Fisher et al, 2020) and Roberto Abadie (2019), for whom research ‘guineapigs’ experience various kinds of exploitation similar to others who are captured by the precarious gig economy. How might such research open up how such labour processes might bear on data reliability and validity – and hence on the phenomena under investigation by those preoccupied by problems of replication?…”

Section: Labour In Psychology the Labour Of Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Replication and Reproduction: Crises in Psychology and Academic Labour

Callard

2022

Review of General Psychology

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Discussions of the replication crisis in psychology require more substantive analysis of the crisis of academic labour and of social reproduction in the university. Both the replication crisis and the crisis of social reproduction in the university describe a failure in processes of reproducing something. The financial crisis of 2007–8 shortly preceded the emergence of the replication crisis, as well as exacerbated ongoing tendencies in the organisation and practices of university research (particularly the use of precarious contracts and the adjunctification of research). These provide two reasons to address these two named crises together. But many analyses of and responses to the replication crisis turn to research culture, often at the expense of adequate investigations of research labour. Today’s psychological sciences are made through multiple forms of labour: these include researchers, who range from senior principal investigators to sub-contracted, and exploited, research assistants; research participants/subjects, who include those providing labour for experiments via exploitative platforms including Amazon Mechanical Turk; and workers providing heterogeneous technical and administrative labour. Through understanding what is at stake for these multiple forms of labour, psychology might better analyse problems besetting psychology today, as well as develop different imaginaries and practices for how to address them.

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Speculating on precarious income: finance cultures and the risky strategies of healthy volunteers in clinical drug trials

Cited by 3 publications

References 62 publications

Healthy volunteers in US phase I clinical trials: Sociodemographic characteristics and participation over time

Healthy volunteers in US phase I clinical trials: Sociodemographic characteristics and participation over time

Precarious Participants, Online Labour Platforms and the Academic Mode of Production: Examining Gigified Research Participation

Replication and Reproduction: Crises in Psychology and Academic Labour

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