“Money Helps”: People who inject drugs and their perceptions of financial compensation and its ethical implications

Abstract

This study documents how people who inject drugs (PWID) in rural Puerto Rico perceive payments for participating in HIV epidemiological studies. In-depth interviews were conducted among a subset (n = 40) of active PWID older than 18 years of age who had been previously enrolled in a much larger study (N = 360). Findings suggest that financial compensation was the main motivation for initially enrolling in the parent study. Then, as trust in the researchers developed, participants came to perceive compensation as part of a reciprocal exchange in which they assisted researchers by providing a trustful account of their experiences and researchers reciprocated with financial support.

Keywords:

• financial compensation
• perception
• ethics
• PWID
• Puerto Rico

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge our Community Advisory Board. We also thank Carmen Davila Torres and Angelica Rivera, our research staff, and Jo Gerrard and Erin Martineau for editorial support.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Fordham University HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute/National Institutes on Drug Abuse (R25DA031608-01; Director, Celia B. Fisher). The research infrastructure in Puerto Rico was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and National Institutes of Health [R01DA037117]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.