Best practice would be for animal rights advocates and psychological scientists to fully consider these kinds of issues ahead of time and come to a transparent agreement about how they would be handled during their collaboration. Our idea was to generate a document that could guide people at the outset of this kind of work.
Read the entire report here: A Roadmap for Collaboration between Animal Rights Advocates and Psychological Scientists
Photo credit:
"Friends' footsteps" -
Linda Robert, Unsplash.com
What is the brief history of this document? What motivated its
production, how did it come together, and who has been involved?
A few years ago, I started consulting on a project with Courtney
Dillard and Andie Thompkins from
Mercy For Animals (MFA) to conduct
survey data on attitudes about farmed animals and plant-based foods
across 23 countries. During our work together, it became clear to me
that there are important differences in the way academics like me
and advocates like Courtney and Andie approach our work. This
collaboration has been wonderful for me so far, and hopefully MFA
has also seen it as a success. However, there were some differences
in perspective along the way that I wished I had considered ahead of
time.
For instance, my practice is to always post all my materials, data,
and script for other researchers to access, use, and check my work,
but there are obvious reasons why this is not advisable in an
advocacy context. Another example is that the outlets that are most
impactful for scientists (peer-reviewed journals like PHAIR) are not
the same as the outlets that are most impactful for advocates (more
publicly visible blogs, social media, and targeted communications to
members), and this can affect the way studies are conducted and how
the results are written up. These are not things I really thought
fully about before beginning this project with MFA, but I spent a
lot of time thinking about them during our work together.
Courtney, Andie, and I agreed that it might be helpful to the field
for us to try to parse these kinds of issues and to encourage
productive advocacy-science collaboration more generally. We
enlisted two colleagues who we knew would have significant
experience and good ideas about this – Andrea Polanco from
Faunalytics and Chris Bryant from
Bryant Research.
....
Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE.