Ethical considerations with balancing clinical effectiveness with research design

Although most clinicians use informal methods to evaluate their interventions, experimentation is necessary to determine whether the intervention produced the observed behavior change for an individual patient rather than other, extraneous variables. By integrating research and clinical practice, behavior analysts can more accurately determine the effects of their interventions with individual patients, advance our understanding of the variables that affect treatment effectiveness, and improve outcomes for current and future patients. However, the goals of research can sometimes conflict with the clinical needs of individual patients, which can cause ethical challenges for behavior analysts. This chapter will address these ethical challenges by describing the overlap between research and clinical practice, highlight the points where research and clinical practice diverge, and provide recommendations for addressing ethical issues that arise at these points.