Research Ethics

Vitak, Shilton & Ashktorab (2016) highlights that boom of social media lead to huge amount of online personal data which is a boon to social computing research. However, increasing research using online public data like social media, text mining, tracing activity, ethnography, forums etc. raise concerns and challenges to traditional principles of ethics while performing research. Belmont principle emphasized three main principles:

1. Respect of participants – informed consent is one way to respect participant, but it is difficult to gather consent from thousands of online folks generating “big data”. Use of privacy settings does not guarantee because researchers can get the data directly from host platforms.

2. Beneficence while selecting participants – minimal risk to participant is interpreted as beneficence through confidentiality or anonymity, which is difficult to maintain while using online data. De-anonymization can be performed while using another data set thus complicating risks for participants.

3. Justice in selecting participants – fairness in participant selection is understood as justice in selecting participants, which is challenging to attain due to non-uniform social media demographics. Variables like gender, race, socio-economic status, age, and technical status can cause potential bias in research.

While performing the research, one must adhere to highest standards of ethics by following the laws and guidelines of given country including, but not limited to:

1. Respect, privacy, confidentiality, and security of all research participants should be maintained

2. Written and signed consent of research participant should be mandatory before the start of research

3. Transparency and fairness should be maintained throughout

4. Bias and deception (falsehood) in research should be removed

5. Rights of research participant should be shared, which include asking questions, walking away from participation at any time etc.

6. Participants should be informed about the date of destruction of records

7. No harm should happen to research participants or compensation of any form be given to participants (voluntary participation should be mandated)

Besides above guiding principles, institutional review board (IRB) across academic institutions and industry will ensure the enforcement of above statutes by supervising the conduct of research and researcher under the jurisdiction of law and community norms. In addition to above, online research require stricter transparency requirements, ethical deliberation and caution in sharing to further protect the rights of participants.

Reference:

Ashktorab, Z., Shilton, K., & Vitak, J. (2016) Beyond the Belmont principles: ethical challenges, practices and beliefs in the online data research community. CSCW 2016 Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing, 941-953