Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #113571

Rhonda Love, PhD, Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto, 12 Queen's Park Crescent West, Toronto, ON M5S 1A8, Canada, 416-978-7514, rhonda.love@utoronto.ca and Allison Hudgins, LLB, LLM, Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto, 12 Queen's Park Crescent West, Toronto, ON M5S1A8, Canada.

The scientific community has been concerned with a perceived decline in the public's trust in health researchers. As a result, conflicts of interest affecting researchers have attracted greater scrutiny.

We believe that the relationship between trust and conflicts of interest has not been thoroughly explicated and have found that trust is variously described in the literature. Some research focuses on the public's trust of individual practitioners, some on the professions themselves and some on the scientific process and the information it produces. Trust is also a concept central to the literature on social cohesion and health inequalities.

We have conducted extensive literature reviews looking for connections between the trust that people have in science (public trust) and the trust they have in one another as members of a community (social cohesion). While there is research, for example, about the need for trust between research partners (e.g., community and/or corporate and/or university-based health researchers) which would suggest connections between public trust in science and the trust that defines social cohesion, the social cohesion research does not seem to link trust in social networks to trust in the scientific enterprise. In turn, the research on the public trust of researchers does not seem to link itself to the trust that members of the public may have in one another. Trust is essential to the research enterprise and to research ethics. We will present approaches to clarifying the concept and demonstrate possible connections between two distinct literatures on trust to research ethics.

Learning Objectives:

• To explicate trust as it is discussed in various health-related literatures and its relationship to conflict of interest.
• To discuss efforts to contain conflict of interest in health research.

Keywords: Policy/Policy Development, Research Ethics

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.