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The Ethics of Internet Research
Rebecca Eynon, Jenny Fry and Ralph Schroeder
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxfordwww.oii.ox.ac.uk
New technology, old and new ethics
• Ethical governance in traditional research settings
• What’s new?• Sensitivity to context
• Approaches to Internet research– Gathering data directly from individuals– Analyzing Interaction in Virtual Environments– Internet as a Social Science Lab
Gathering data directly from individuals
• Focus on survey, interviews and focus groups– Benefits and risks– Ensuring confidentiality– Informed consent
• A balancing act – Protected but not burdened
Benefits and risks
• Protection of harm online– More difficult to assess the risks and benefits online– More of an issue for interviews and focus groups than
surveys?
• Strategies– Make it clear participants can leave– Prior rapport with participant– Establishing netiquette
• Protection of harm - researchers & participants
Ensuring anonymity and confidentiality
• Perceived anonymity of the Internet
• Considerations when– Transmitting data– Storing data– Interacting with participants
• Difficulties of direct email contact– FAQs
– Rewards for participating
Informed consent
• Difficult in any context but often more so online– Distance between researcher & participant– Challenges anonymity strategies
• Strategies– Email discussion– Readability of documents– Using quizzes to check understanding
• Verifying ability to give informed consent– Recruitment strategy– Verifying identity – e.g. via a credit card
Analyzing Interaction in Virtual Environments
• Focus on graphical online spaces with avatar interaction
• Differences in text-only versus voice communication, video- versus virtual, etc.
• Contexts of use include online gaming, spaces for socializing and collaborating, training online for offline tasks, experimenting in virtual
Research on VEs: Contexts and the role of the Researcher
• Contact people offline? – Weigh burden on research participant
• The online social setting: formally public, but respect the conventions for the privacy of the space? – Be sensitive to context
• Disclose researcher identity? – Online possibilities are different from offline (ID tag)
• ‘Invasion’ of researchers– Respect social milieu
Research on VEs: Data Capture
• Tools for capture are more powerful than for capturing offline interactions
• Anonymous data about populations, but surveillance?
• Reproducing and anonymizing captured interactions, but possible identification by search?
Research in Online Worlds
• Maintaining the trust of environments and avatars and the persons ‘behind them’
• New possibilities for the study of social interaction in online worlds and VEs – Virtual Milgram as example
• A balance of deontological and utilitarian research ethics
Large-scale analysis of online domains
• The Internet as a social science laboratory
• Capacity to capture traces of social interaction on a global scale
• Creation of data sets and visualization tools that enable previously invisible social structures to be rendered visible
• Raises unique set of ethical issues
Private spaces in public places
• Online forum open to the public: ‘forbidden love’ and ‘the art of forbidden love’(Example thanks to Gustavo Mesch)
• Participants assume a role, use of nicknames, keeping places of work and home private
• Need an email address and password to contribute; if not a member you can read postings
• Active contributors @50 people, readership much larger; ability to have private one-to-one messages
• A kind of support group; meet every 2-3 months in a café etc.
• Issues of privacy and anonymity very important to the group
Researcher dilemma
• All stories are public; archived for past two years; a lot of data
• Contributors do not have a sense of public, they are part of a group; conflict with the concept of ‘open’
• What O’Riordan and Bassett (2002) term ‘nested utopic’ spaces
• This perception relates directly to content analysis; but • There are structural issues relating to:
– culture, values, role of the community, who sustains it, what is the interaction?
• What would be harm in this context? Does not involve direct human intervention, so little formal guidance
• Who has right to structural information?
Contextual integrity
• Closely related to personal perceptions of privacy
• New contexts may necessitate different privacy protections
• Status and interests in data may change over time
• More difficult to gauge what is ethically appropriate
• Privacy online closely related to how the Internet is governed
Conclusions• Challenges in devising a code of practice in a global context• Necessity to represent and incorporate diverse
– Disciplines– research methods– cultural practices– institutional governance and;– legal frameworks
• Research object no longer clearly delineated and protected by national boundaries
• Convergence of commercial and research interests due to ease of re-use
• Data are more likely to be reconceptualised in new settings by new actors
• Is there a boundary to be respected between the online and offline worlds of online social actors?
• To what extent should we protect from harm for unforeseen consequences?