Research Ethics Matter Now That Women Are Exercise Study 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 occasions, I have witnessed researchers (often postgraduate students) directly approaching other students or researchers at their desks and asking if they want to participate in a specific experiment. In these cases, I have never witnessed someone being threatened with punishment if they reject the offer. But clearly there is a difference between being approached spontaneously in person versus reading about a volunteer opportunity through an advertisement. The direct approach is further problematic because students are sometimes approached while sitting in offices that they share with other students. The student who is approached might be feel pressured to say “yes” because they know others are overhearing their response. In fact, the researcher may be approaching all the students in the office. Thus, a student may feel pressured to say “yes” because other students in the office are saying “yes.”

Another technique that is sometimes used to ratchet up the pressure to participate in a study is to email individual people requesting their participation. I have received several emails like this over my time in academia.

A key reason why these pressure-to-participate techniques sometimes occur in exercise science departments is because postgraduate student researchers are under pressure to finish projects by thesis deadlines, and most exercise science projectes are not funded by big research grants. Consequently, these departments have little or no money to pay individuals to participate in experiments. Then, because there is little incentive for individuals to take time out of their schedules to run on a treadmill until exhaustion or get their nerves zapped, finding participants becomes difficult. Professors and postgraduate students then apply pressure on students to participate.

Poor project management and decision making also play a role. For example, professors often put their postgraduate students in binds by asking them to complete projects that are unfeasible given the lack of money, resources, and individuals who are willing and eligible to participate.

Thus, I commend Rendos and Wilburn for discussing the issue of coerced participation in exercise experiments, though I think the argument would be strengthened by survey data of exercises science students, asking them how often they have felt coerced to participate in experiments. Rendos and Wilburn cite relevant findings from psychology students, but they represent a unique cohort, because, somehow, the field of psychology has, for many years, been allowed to have students participate in experiments as part of their requirements.

Nevertheless, I want to call out Rendos and Wilburn on the aspect of their paper that dealt with the sex of exercise research participants. A main driver of their paper was an obs