Human participants devote their time to our research when they participate in our studies. To me, it is not only an ethical but also a moral obligation to ensure that participants can enjoy their time as much as possible.
My real-world study involved palpating participants’ bodies in order to take body measures from them which ensure high quality measurement results. All of my participants had the choice to pick a female or male RA to get these measurements done. And, of course, I would be present to help whenever my RAs’ confidence was below a certain threshold.
I have done a lot to train my RAs appropriately for this task, including hands-on sessions with a physical therapist. During the process, we did not only explain each step of the measurements/outfitting in detail but we were also making sure our participants could love about what was going on – in particular when it came to doing a person’s laces (a motion capture sensor had to be placed underneath or on top of the tongue of the participants’ shoes…)….