When our class with Professor McCoy went to Newton Hall and video messaged with Dr. Ben Chapman from North Carolina State. This is a brief quote about Chapman, “Dr. Ben Chapman is a professor and food safety extension specialist at North Carolina State University. As a teenager, a Saturday afternoon viewing of the classic cable movie, Outbreak, sparked his interest in pathogens and public health. With the goal of less foodborne illness, his group designs, implements, and evaluates food safety strategies, messages, and media from farm-to-fork. Through reality-based research, Chapman investigates behaviors and creates interventions aimed at amateur and professional food handlers, managers, and organizational decision-makers; the gatekeepers of safe food. Ben co-hosts a bi-weekly podcast called Food Safety Talk and tries to further engage folks online” I thought it was just going to be a lecture type conference about what to do and what not to do but in reality, it was more of what he has done wrong and what bad experiences he has been through. After thinking about the whole Video conference and looking over my notes I have been thinking that these experiences he told us about happen all the time in life and especially in the business of using people for testing your product.
Finding out what truly was Ben Chapmans job was very interesting, his day to day on how he dealt with the people that he uses in his tests. He would go to different test sites and record information of what people’s individual actions or opinions are. Gathering the information is not the difficult part of Dr. Ben Chapman job in my eyes. In Chapmans eyes he is an ethnologist which is considered the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them. It is when he has to deal with the people that partake in the test. He has to make sure he gets Informed Consent fully, that each person fully understands the study and what they get and what you get from them.
One thing I would say is that Dr. Ben Chapman might be one of the best people in his profession for being aware to peoples need for knowing everything in what they are being tested on that won’t affect the test. That is the only issue sometimes for Chapman is not being able to tell people about somethings due to the fact it might affect the test. Dr. Ben Chapman even is a member of the Institutional Review Board where he monitors other professionals’ studies. One thing Chapman stressed was that there is no way you can partake in a study without the person being manipulated a bit. At least this is true just to make the study effective no singular person can have all the information about a study.