“The Camp: When a child experiment goes wrong” — BBC, 2018, 28:11 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZp8QMlR2LM

Camp Dash at Purdue University can be used as a case study in poorly-designed and badly-managed research. Short for “Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension”, Camp Dash was supposed to be a 7 week experiment investigating a low-sodium diet’s effect on blood pressure in children ages 11-15. However, Purdue’s IRB pulled the plug on the experiment after several police visits resulting in arrests and numerous reports of violence among the study participants. So what went wrong and who is to plan? This video explains how much of the blame can be placed on misguided decisions in the research planning stage.

Researchers have an ethical obligation to protect their participants from harm yet pressures to publish and competitive grant funds can easily blind us to potential risks. For example, the participants in Camp Dash were recruited from lower-class families in inner cities. These children were arguably pressured by the generous incentive to participate, and the experiment was pitched to families more as a summer camp than data collection project. They were told there would be sports, activities, and field trips, but the majority of the schedule made by the research team was dominated by unstructured down time. There was also a lack of mental health services though the population recruited for the study is known to have a high degree of trauma. The experiment also suffered from a shortage of well-trained staff and poor communication between the research team. Likewise, there were pressures to withhold reporting incidents as the impressive grant fundinging

We learn a lot in this video about IRBs (Institutional Review Boards) and how research ethics become secondary when large grants enter the picture. Perhaps the biggest problem of all here, though, is that the research team did not match the participants in the study. They eventually recruited a counselor with experience working with underprivileged youth, but this would have been better to do in the planning stage. If the day was structured in an engaging way, if staff had appropriate training for working with children exposed to violence, and if incidents were reported and corrected, the experiment might have been a success. Unfortunately, collecting data was deemed more important than participant wellbeing.

Who is to blame for this disaster? How could the researchers improve their design and implementation? If you were conducting this study, what would you have done differently? What should we do to prevent situations like this from happening in the future?

From the video’s description: Camp Dash was no ordinary summer camp in Indiana. Children were there to take part in a multi-million dollar nutrition experiment. But events quickly spiralled out of control, and some of the children turned on each other. The consequences haven’t been easy to forget.