ABSTRACT
Environmental health research often has implications for policy decisions that impact moral, political, social, and economic values and interests. This chapter discusses how values may impact environmental health research, and argue that transparency can play a crucial role in addressing biases in environmental health research. Transparency involves honestly and openly disclosing one's methods, materials, and data as well as financial, political, and other values or interests that may impact one's research. The value-neutrality view holds that science ought to be neutral with respect to extra-scientific values. Transparency plays an important role in the limited value-neutrality approach to the relationship between science and values. Transparency in science involves full disclosure of methods, materials, data, assumptions, ethics approvals, and other informational items that can impact the outcome of research. The company that manufactures the chemical, an environmental group, and an independent government organization could all sponsor studies on the safety of a chemical and offer their interpretations of the data.
