Kamiel Verbeke

• M.D.
• PhD Student at KU Leuven

Research ethics guidance on deception does not seem to provide extensive support to researchers and ethics reviewers on how to assess the justifiability of specific deceptive studies. One potential explanation for this shortcoming is that guidance does not offer precise and coherent descriptions of the ethically relevant characteristics of deceptiv...

Ethical safeguards such as debriefing are often recommended or required for research studies in which participants are deceived. However, existing guidance on these safeguards seems insufficiently coherent and precise, which may be associated with their suboptimal implementation in practice. This study aimed to contribute to a more coherent and pre...

Mental health-related data generated by app users during the routine use of Consumer Mental Health Apps (CMHAs) are being increasingly leveraged for research and product improvement studies. However, it remains unclear which ethical safeguards and practices should be implemented by researchers and app developers to protect users during these studie...

Consumer mental health apps (MHAs) collect and generate mental health-related data on their users, which can be leveraged for research and product improvement studies. Such studies are associated with ethical issues that may be difficult for researchers and app developers to assess. To improve ethical study conduct, governance through rules, agreem...

The use of smartphones has greatly increased in the last decade and has revolutionized the way that health data are being collected and shared. Mobile applications leverage the ubiquity and technological sophistication of modern smartphones to record and process a variety of metrics relevant to human health, including behavioral measures, clinical...

Informed consent and debriefing of research participants in studies that use deception are ethical safeguards for which existing scholarly work on their implementation remains variable and insufficiently clear. A systematic review of research ethics guidelines was conducted to sketch a picture of whether, why and how informed consent and debriefing...

Research participants are often deceived for methodological reasons. However, assessing the ethical acceptability of an individual study that uses deception is not straightforward. The academic literature is scattered on the subject and several aspects of the acceptability assessment are only scarcely addressed, which parallels reports of inconsist...