Human Subject Research

Posted college tuition has been on the rise in recent decades.  There is a lot of debate about the the cause of rising sticker prices, but one factor that is often blamed is the increasing number of administrators.  Less well appreciated are the factors causing the increasing number of administrators.  One driver is the fact that more staff are needed to comply with increasing regulations and accountability imposed on universities from state and federal governments.  

One example that affects my area of research most directly is human subjects research committees (or the so-called internal review board, IRB).  Early in my career, if I wanted to survey food consumers or run an experiment in a grocery store, I just did it.  I didn't have to ask permission or get approval from a university administrator.  But, somewhere along the way, the federal government required universities wishing to receive federal monies to have projects approved by local IRBs.  Now, all major universities have their own IRBs with various sized staffs and with faculty spending time chairing and serving on IRB committees (full disclosure: I've served as an alternative member of OSU's IRB for several years).

Some of the basic ideas behind IRB approval process are worthwhile: making sure people aren't being unduly coerced and are participating in research voluntarily, making sure research participants' information isn't being used in a way that embarrasses the participant or can be used against them in some way (i.e., protects confidentiality), and making sure the research doesn't generate undue risks for participants in research that are incommensurate with the benefits.  

All that said, from a researcher's perspective, all this can be a real pain even for the most minor of surveys.  Surveys that are anonymous are technically exempt from IRB approval, but the researcher doesn't have the ability to make that determination: they have to fill out a long form, send the research instrument, including information on participant recruiting, etc. to an IRB committee and wait for them make the determination (before all this, the researcher has to undergo a training on human subjects research and pass several tests).  And wait you will.  I've heard stories from colleagues having to wait several months for an IRB determination.  And when you hear back, you often are asked to make changes to your research design that have little to do with the aforementioned purposes of the IRBs.  If you're trying to do a survey on a current policy issue, you've now waited weeks or months for approval, and even if a project is approved, if you want to reword a question or add a new one to address evolving events, now you have to submit a change modification form that also has to be approved.  Given these timing issues, it has become next to impossible, for example, to have graduate students do publishable quality surveys/experiments for class projects.  

I've largely had positive experiences with IRBs (I've had a couple bad ones too), but one shouldn't mistake the cost this imposes on researchers, on the university, and ultimately the taxpayer and student.  Whether the benefits of the system exceeds these costs is a question I've never seen seriously addressed.  

Change is afoot. This is from an article by Richard Shweder and Richard Nisbett in the Chronicle of Higher Education back in March:           

“It has been a 40-year labor: Regulatory systems are not easy to undo. Nevertheless, in January the federal government opened the door for universities to deregulate vast portions of research in the social sciences, law, and the humanities. This long-sought and welcome reform of the regulations requiring administrative oversight of federally funded human-subject research on college campuses limits the scope of institutional review board, or IRB, management by exempting low-risk research with human subjects from the board’s review.”

I suggest reading the whole thing.  The authors provide some history of these programs and passionately convey their frustration with the present system.  They also note that universities have till next year to figure out how to address the changes in federal regulations.  

Another article in the New York Times is more critical of the changes and is less optimistic that real changes will occur for human subjects research.  However, I'm beginning to hear rumblings at a few universities that they will not longer require prior approval from IRB for certain types of human subjects research.  The end of the NYT article suggests what some of this is about: absent federal guidelines universities may still want to review research to reduce the risk of controversy, embarrassment, or lawsuits.  Those are legitimate concerns but are likely to run up against issues of academic freedom and freedom of inquiry.  And, they are concerns that are distinct from protecting participants of human subjects.  

What to Eat when Having a Millennial Over for Dinner

That's the title of a new working paper co-authored with Ph.D. student Kelsey Conley.  There is a lot of talk about how millennial's food preference may differ from previous generations, but much less is available in terms of hard evidence.  Here's what we write as the challenge with a lot of the previous research in this area (this criticism is also be true of previous blog posts I've written on the subject, such as this one and this one): 

“A key downside of the previous research in this area is that today’s millennials are typically compared to today’s older generations. This sort of analysis presents a confound because older people are likely to differ from younger people at any point in time. That is, an “age effect” is confounded with a “millennial effect.” The more difficult question is whether today’s young people are different than younger people decades ago. To address this issue, cohort analyses are often conducted (Pitta et al., 2012). However, cohort comparisons are also confounded by a myriad of factors that change over time. For example, falling prices or rising incomes may lead young people today to make different purchases than young people in previous decades. To sort out this conundrum, this paper uses a difference-in-difference estimator to identify the causal effect of millennials. Using high quality government survey data [the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s Consumer Expenditure Survey], we compare the difference in food spending between the young and old in 1980 to the difference in young and old in 2015. We refer to the resulting estimate as the “millennial effect” that provides insights into whether millennials truly have different food preferences than other generations. To our knowledge, no previous research has used difference-in-difference methods to determine the millennial effect in a theoretically consistent demand framework. ”

Some summary statistics and preliminary analysis:

“To preview our subsequent analysis, a crude difference-in-difference effect can be calculated. In 1980, the young spent $25.48-$38.98=-$13.5/week less than the old on meat. In 2015, however, the young (millennials) only spent $14.28-$18.43 = -$4.15/week on meat than the old. Thus, the millennial effect (or difference-in-difference) for meat is -$4.15+13.43 = $9.28/week. So, even though spending on meat has declined among both the old and the young from 1980 to 2015, it has declined even more among the old than the young. Thus, this crude estimate suggests young people are spending $9.28/week more in 2015 than they otherwise would have because they are millennials. ”

Our main findings are likely to be somewhat unexpected.  We find that the "millennial effect" is positive on food expenditure shares for three meat categories (beef, pork, and poultry), eggs, cereal, and fresh fruit.  A statistically significant negative ‘millennial’ effect is found for non-alcoholic beverages and food away from home.  This doesn't mean millennials are spending less of their food budget eating out (or spending more of their food budget on meat) than young people from the 1980s, only that they're spending less of their food budget eating out (and spending more of their budget on meat) compared to older folks today than in the past.   

China's Food Economy

Bloomberg has a great feature article on food and agriculture in China with excellent visuals.  The article makes the case (correctly in my view) that China will have to rely on technology to sustainable feed its growing population.  

“But China’s efforts to buy or lease agricultural land in developing nations show that building farms and ranches abroad won’t be enough. Ballooning populations in Asia, Africa and South America will add another 2 billion people within a generation and they too will need more food.

That leaves China with a stark ultimatum: If it is to have enough affordable food for its population in the second half of this century, it will need to make sure the world grows food for 9 billion people.

Its answer is technology.”

Check out the whole thing to see graphs on rapidly increasing protein consumption and high levels of fertilizer use in the country compared to the US and other locations.

New Competition for Meal Kits

About a year and a half ago I was interviewed by the Atlanta Tribune about a story they were running about prepared meal kit services (think Blue Apron, HelloFresh, or my family's favorite Martha and Marley Spoon)  One of the questions they asked me was whether I expected the market to grow  Here's what I said then.

“Hard to say. It will depend on the ability of the box services to continue to offer competitive offerings with grocery stores and restaurants, and it will depend on how these other food service outlets respond in turn. For example, restaurants already offer take out. And, what’s to stop Walmart or Kroger from offering their own boxes ready for pickup?”

As it turns out, I heard a story on NPR this morning by Dan Gorenstein with Marketplace covering precisely this topic.  Apparently Kroger and Publix are, in fact, going to create their own prepared kits.  It's doesn't take a genius to see that this was going to happen.  Gorenstein interviewed Northwestern economist Mike Mazzeo who said supermarket chains are "well positioned" to take a bite out of the growing business.  Mazzeo said  

“Supermarkets can get things at lower prices. They have access to all of the ingredients for these meals. They don’t have to do marketing. They can just put it on their shelves. ”

That is, grocery stores can provide a similar service at a fraction of the cost.  In some ways the grocery story offerings will be more convenient because one doesn't have to sign up for a subscription and pre-plan which and how many meals to buy and plan to be home when the box is delivered.  But, it would require you to go to the store, and that's part of the convenience of the meal delivery service - not having to visit the store.  

While I'm sure Blue Apron et al. can't be thrilled to see new competition from grocery stores, this is a good sign for consumers.  We'll have wider availability of options at lower cost.  

Escalating health care costs . . . for pets

I was intrigued by this article by Stanford and MIT professors, Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Atul Gupta in the most recent issue of the American Economic Review (ungated version here).  We are all aware that Americans spend a lot on health care, but there seems to be a lot of disagreement as to why.  Some say it's too much government regulation.  Others say too little.  These authors point out, however, that spending on pet health care roughly mirrors that on humans despite the fact that this is a largely unregulated industry. 

The authors write:

“The fact that despite these differences—often mentioned as potential explanations for the large and rapidly growing health-care sector in the United States—some pet health-care patterns appear qualitatively quite similar to the analogous human health-care pattern, strikes us as noteworthy. It should give us pause before attributing the large and rising health-care costs in the United States solely to the prevalence of insurance and government involvement. The similar growth patterns in US human and pet health care may also suggest that technological change in human health care may have spillover effects on related sectors, including perhaps pet health care or human care in other countries.”

A couple figures from the paper.