Turning Virtual Public Spaces into Laboratories: Thoughts on Conducting Online Field Studies Using Social Network Sites
Abstract
This article deals with the topic of ethics in large-scale online studies on social network sides. ‘Big data’ and large-scale online field studies are a relatively new phenomenon and clear ethical guidelines for social science research are still lacking. In this paper I focus on the ethical question of getting informed consent when we collect data from Social Network Sites (SNS). I argue that data from SNS are not per se public and research based on these data should not be exempt from the ethical standard that informed consent must be obtained from participants. Based on the concept of privacy in context (Nissenbaum, 2010), I further propose that this is because the norms of distribution and appropriateness are violated when researchers manipulate online contexts and collect data without consent. Finally, I make suggestions for existing and possible future practices for large-scale online studies.
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- "However, developments in internet research also pose new ethical challenges (Fiske & Hauser, 2014; Kahn, Vayena, & Mastroianni, 2014). Several of these challenges have been identified and addressed in recent years and they tend to focus on issues such as informed consent, debriefing, which data is public or private, and on issues of anonymity (Bruder, Göritz, Reips, & Gebhard, 2014; Buchanan & Williams, 2010; Gleibs, 2014; Gosling & Mason, 2015; Kahn et al., 2014; Sabou, Bontcheva, & Scharl, 2012). One ethical challenge that is especially pertinent to research using the internet and the case of crowdsourced data collection is whether there is a difference in commercial vs. public use of data collected via third parties such as MTurk (Vayena, Salathé, Madoff, & Brownstein, 2015). "
[Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: New technologies like large-scale social media sides (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) and crowdsourcing services (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, Clickworker) impact social science research and provide many new and interesting avenues for research. The use of these new technologies for research has not been without challenges and a recently published psychological study on Facebook led to a widespread discussion on the ethics of conducting large-scale experiments online. Surprisingly little has been said about the ethics of conducting research using commercial crowdsourcing market places. In this paper, I want to focus on the question of which ethical questions are raised by data collection with crowdsourcing tools. I briefly draw on implications of internet research more generally and then focus on the specific challenges that research with crowdsourcing tools faces. I identify fair-pay and related issues of respect for autonomy as well as problems with power dynamics between researcher and participant, which has implications for ‘withdrawal-without-prejudice’, as the major ethical challenges with crowdsourced data. Further, I will to draw attention on how we can develop a ‘best practice’ for researchers using crowdsourcing tools.- "Furthermore, the active nature of PUEs allows some conditions of the experiments to be tuned to explore alternative scenarios. PUEs can indeed be an alternative to the controversial virtual labs in social networks and mobile games which have yielded interesting results, for instance, in emotional contagion with experiments on the Facebook platform [53], not without an intense public debate on ethical and privacy issues concerning the way the experiments were performed [54]. We think that PUEs could become an essential approach for the empirically testing of the many statements of CSS which is complementary to the lab-in-the-field, virtual labs and in vitro experiences. "
[Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: Under the name of Citizen Science, many innovative practices in which volunteers partner with scientist to pose and answer real-world questions are quickly growing worldwide. Citizen Science can furnish ready made solutions with the active role of citizens. However, this framework is still far from being well stablished to become a standard tool for Computational Social Sciences research. We present our experience in bridging Computational Social Sciences with Citizen Science philosophy, which in our case has taken the form of what we call Pop-Up Experiments: Non-permanent, highly participatory collective experiments which blend features developed by Big Data methodologies and Behavioural Experiments protocols with ideals of Citizen Science. The main issues to take into account whenever planning experiments of this type are classified and discused grouped in three categories: public engagement, light infrastructure and knowledge return to citizens. We explain the solutions implemented providing practical examples grounded in our own experience in urban contexts (Barcelona, Spain). We hope that this work serves as guideline to groups willing to adopt and expand such \emph{in-vivo} practices and opens the debate about the possibilities (but also the limitations) that the Citizen Science framework can offer to study social phenomena.- "Consequently, a formal declaration of ethical research guidelines for private corporations is necessary. For instance, as Gleibs (2014) notes, Bond et al. (2012) had to justify the omission of participant informed consent to their university's IRB (Gleibs, 2014). Facebook is not subject to similar regulation. "
[Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: Social networking sites (SNS) provide researchers with an unprecedented amount of user derived personal information. This wealth of information can be invaluable for research purposes. However, the privacy of the SNS user must be protected from both public and private researchers. New research capabilities raise new ethical concerns. We argue that past research regulation has largely been in reaction to questionable research practices, and therefore new innovations need to be regulated before SNS users’ privacy is irreparably compromised. It is the responsibility of the academic community to start this ethical discourse.
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