Is this appropriate compensation or undue influence?

If you answered immediately — in either direction — I would push back. The answer depends on factors that the dollar amount alone does not reveal. What are the study risks? Is the investigational product a first-in-human compound with unknown safety, or a well-characterized molecule with decades of safety data? What does the local market for healthy volunteer studies typically pay? Are the participants free to withdraw without financial penalty, or is the full payment contingent on completing all six visits?

This is the central difficulty of recruitment ethics: there is no bright line. No dollar threshold above which compensation becomes coercion and below which it remains permissible. Instead, there is a spectrum — and the coordinator, the investigator, the IRB, and the sponsor must all be capable of evaluating where a given practice falls on that spectrum. That evaluation requires a framework, not intuition.

This lesson gives you that framework.

Is this appropriate compensation or undue influence?

If you answered immediately — in either direction — I would push back. The answer depends on factors that the dollar amount alone does not reveal. What are the study risks? Is the investigational product a first-in-human compound with unknown safety, or a well-characterized molecule with decades of safety data? What does the local market for healthy volunteer studies typically pay? Are the participants free to withdraw without financial penalty, or is the full payment contingent on completing all six visits?

This is the central difficulty of recruitment ethics: there is no bright line. No dollar threshold above which compensation becomes coercion and below which it remains permissible. Instead, there is a spectrum — and the coordinator, the investigator, the IRB, and the sponsor must all be capable of evaluating where a given practice falls on that spectrum. That evaluation requires a framework, not intuition.

This lesson gives you that framework.