Ethical Issues with Contingent Valuation Surveys in Developing Countries: A Note on Informed Consent and Other Concerns

Dale Whittington

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2004, vol. 28, issue 4, 507-515

Abstract: This article calls attention to some of the problems involved in the ethical review and oversight of contingent valuation research in developing countries, including the question of what informed consent means in a cross-cultural context. A central area of concern is that contingent valuation (CV) surveys have the potential to confuse or mislead respondents. This can cause an individual respondent who is confused or misled to take actions that could harm himself or members of his household. The spread of misinformation and confusion among the study population could also influence the policy process itself in unintended and unfortunate ways, perhaps harming the respondent or others. There are three main ways in which CV surveys can mislead or confuse an individual respondent and spread confusion in the study population: (1) inaccurate provision of background information in the CV scenario, (2) the description of the hypothetical market, and (3) the use of the referendum elicitation procedure and other split-sample experiments commonly used by CV researchers. The difficulties of cross-cultural communication and cooperation add to the ethical complexity of conducting CV surveys in developing countries. Three cross-cultural problems deserve special attention by both institutional review boards and contingent valuation researchers: (i) promises of anonymity and the right of respondents not to participate, (ii) power asymmetries between international and local members of the contingent valuation research team, and (iii) compensation of respondents. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004

Keywords: contingent valuation method; ethical review; informed consent; institutional review boards (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/B:EARE.0000036776.89379.4f (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:enreec:v:28:y:2004:i:4:p:507-515

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/B:EARE.0000036776.89379.4f

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental & Resource Economics is currently edited by Ian J. Bateman

More articles in Environmental & Resource Economics from Springer, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().