Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

438 Chapter 15
study—they had been recruited by Sarkodie’s supervisor, Sjaak van der Geest,
a Dutch anthropologist who works in Ghana—and Sarkodie wrote a detailed
report for the hospital. Presumably, the report was helpful, but Sarkodie’s fellow
patients were duped (van der Geest and Sarkodie 1998).
Twenty years earlier, David Rosenhan recruited seven confederates who,
like him, checked themselves into mental hospitals and took surreptitious
notes about how they were treated. They gave false names and occupations
(they couldn’t very well mention their real occupations since three of them
were psychologists and one was a psychiatrist), and reported hearing voices.
One was diagnosed as manic-depressive, and the rest as schizophrenics, and
all were admitted for treatment.
This was tough work. The pseudopatients were not allowed to divulge what
they were up to just because they were tired of (or exasperated with) the experiment.
The only way out was to be diagnosed by the hospital staff as ready for
release. It took between 1 week and 7 weeks of confinement to achieve this,
and when they were released, the pseudopatients were all diagnosed with
‘‘schizophrenia in remission’’ or as ‘‘asymptomatic’’ or as ‘‘improved’’
(Rosenhan 1973, 1975).
Rosenhan’s field experiment made clear the power of labeling: Once you
are diagnosed as insane, people treat you as insane. Period. Some of the genuine
inmates at the hospitals saw through the charade, but none of the staff ever
did.
Are these pseudopatient studies ethical? The simulated client method has
been used in dozens of studies to evaluate the performance of physicians,
pharmacists, family-planning clinics, and other health care providers in developing
nations. (See Madden et al. [1997] for a review of these studies; and see
Tuladhar et al. [1998], Katz and Naré [2002], Chalker et al. [2004], and Marsh
et al. [2004] for recent examples.) And fake clients—men and women, black,
white, and Hispanic—are sent out by U.S. government agencies regularly to
apply for jobs, to rent apartments, or to buy homes and to uncover discrimination
(Sharpe 1998). The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that this practice is
legal in the pursuit of fair housing (Ayres 1991:823), and the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission uses data from these field experiments to sue
offending businesses.
People across the political spectrum have quite different ideas about
whether this is just a dose of the same medicine that offenders dish out (which
seems fair), or entrapment (which seems foul). Does this mean that ethics are
simply a matter of political orientation and opinion? In the abstract, most people
answer this question with a strong ‘‘no.’’ When things get concrete—when
the fortunes and reputations of real people are at stake—the answer becomes
less clear for many people.