Research Ethics Matter Now That Women Are Exercise Study Participants
From The Nuzzo Letter by James L. Nuzzo
February 4, 2026 · 14 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the ethical implications of coercion in research involving exercise science students as participants.
In April of 2025, the Journal of Academic Ethics published a paper titled, “ Exercise Science Students as Research Participants in Faculty-Led Research: An Ethical Dilemma .” The paper was written by two kinesiologists or biomechanists in the United States: Nicole Rendos and Christopher Wilburn . In their paper, which was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, Rendos and Wilburn put forward the idea that exercise science students are vulnerable to coercion to participate in research experiments because those experiments are often conducted by the students’ lecturers or supervisors. I agree with the overall premise of Rendos and Wilburn’s paper. For many years, I have observed some exercise science faculty and postgraduate students coercing students to participate in experiments. I have never witnessed overt coercion that involved students being punished or threatened with punishment for not participating in experiments. Instead, the coercion has been more subtle. It has been more like “nudges” that ramp up the pressure to participate or strategies that “trap” the individual into feeling that they need to participate. On multiple…
People in this episode
Host: James L. Nuzzo
Topics covered
- research ethics
- exercise science
- coercion in research
- student participation
- academic integrity
Keywords
- research ethics
- exercise science
- coercion
- student participation
- academic research
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Journal of Academic Ethics, National Institute of Child Health & Human Development
Places: United States
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