Abstract
BackgroundThe use of empirical research methods in bioethics has been increasing in the last decades. It has resulted in discussions about the ‘empirical turn of bioethics’ and raised questions related to the value of empirical work for this field, methodological questions about its quality and rigor, and how this integration of the normative and the empirical can be achieved. The aim of this paper is to describe the attitudes of bioethics researchers in this field towards the use of empirical research, and examine their actual conduct: whether they use empirical research methods (and if so, what methods), and whether (and how) they have made attempts at integrating the empirical and the normative.MethodsAn anonymous online survey was conducted to reach scholars working in bioethics/biomedical ethics/ethics institutes or centers in 12 European countries. A total of 225 bioethics researchers participated in the study. Of those, 200 questionnaires were fully completed, representing a response rate of 42.6%. The results were analysed using descriptive statistics.ResultsMost respondents (n = 175; 87.5%) indicated that they use or have used empirical methods in their work. A similar proportion of respondents (61.0% and 59.0%) reported having had at least some training in qualitative or quantitative methods, respectively. Among the ‘empirical researchers’, more than a fifth (22.9%) had not received any methodological training. It appears that only 6% or less of the ‘empirical researchers’ considered themselves experts in the methods (qualitative or quantitative) that they have used. Only 35% of the scholars who have used empirical methods reported having integrated empirical data with normative analysis, whereas for their current projects, 59.8% plan to do so.ConclusionsThere is a need to evaluate the current educational programs in bioethics and to implement rigorous training in empirical research methods to ensure that ‘empirical researchers’ have the necessary skills to conduct their empirical research in bioethics. Also imperative is clear guidance on the integration of the normative and the empirical so that researchers who plan to do so have necessary tools and competences to fulfil their goals.
Highlights
The use of empirical research methods in bioethics has been increasing in the last decades
Sugarman and colleagues [1] reported that 8% of the papers published between 1980 and 1984 used empirical methods and the proportion of empirical biomedical ethics publications in bioethics has increased to 16% in 2000–2005
Many did not integrate the empirical and the normative. It is not a pre-requisite that all empirical research in bioethics should seek to include normative analysis, scholars have noted the importance of such empirical work in bioethics when it incorporates good quality normative analysis [28, 37]
Summary
The use of empirical research methods in bioethics has been increasing in the last decades It has resulted in discussions about the ‘empirical turn of bioethics’ and raised questions related to the value of empirical work for this field, methodological questions about its quality and rigor, and how this integration of the normative and the empirical can be achieved. Another study that captured the prevalence of empirical research in nine biomedical ethics journals concluded that the use of empirical research had increased from 5.4% in 1990 to 15.3% in 2003 [2] This trend of increasing empirical work in bioethics is evident with the emergence of journals devoted to publishing empirical studies in bioethics, such as AJOB Empirical Bioethics and Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics: A Journal of Qualitative Research. Davies and colleagues [11] noted 32 distinct methodologies of empirical ethics highlighting the many ways of integrating the normative and the empirical. Such integration raises many questions since among other things, the diverse normative ethics viewpoints may result in different interpretations of the same empirical results [12, 13]
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