Raymond De Vries

De Vries serves as Associate Director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine at the University of Michigan; the Center excels in empirical research in bioethics and health policy. He is a medical sociologist with broad experience in several areas related to this research: the study of maternity care systems, research on the ethics of research, methods of qualitative and quantitative research, and the comparative study of health care systems.  De Vries is widely known for his analyses of the organizational and cultural influences on obstetrics and midwifery, demonstrating how medical practice is significantly shaped by non-clinical factors. He is the author of A Pleasing Birth: Midwifery and Maternity Care in the Netherlands (Temple University Press, 2005), a study that uses historical data and qualitative methods – including interviews and observation – to examine the effect of social forces on the way maternity care is delivered. More directly in the field of bioethics, he has studied ethical and policy issues in research ethics review, the organization and performance of IRBs, therapeutic misconception, and the value of “deliberative democracy” for the creation of ethics policies.  De Vries is lead editor of The View from Here: Bioethics and the Social Sciences (Blackwell, 2007), an anthology that explores the value of social science for the work of bioethics; He is co-editor of a special issue of Social Science and Medicine (2013) on ‘bioethics in the field,” an examination of how bioethics operates in different cultural environments. He has published studies of the ethics of maternal request cesarean birth and socio-ethical issues in perinatal care, and co-edited special issue on women’s choices of the place of birth of the Journal of Clinical Ethics. He has extensive knowledge of, and experience with qualitative methods  publishing the results of qualitative research in leading journals and co-editing a handbook on the use of qualitative methods in health research (Qualitative Methods in Health Research, Sage, 2010).  De Vries has successfully directed several collaborative projects including a highly productive team of international scholars focused on comparative study of maternity care systems: that collaboration has resulted in one edited collection, Birth by Design (Routledge, 2001) and several peer-reviewed publications.  In the past 5 years he has been invited to lecture on the sociology of maternity care and on the sociology of bioethics in North America, Europe, Japan and Africa.