The Ethics of Internet Research

1
The Ethics of Internet Research

• Rebecca Eynon, Jenny Fry and Ralph Schroeder
• Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
• www.oii.ox.ac.uk

2
New technology, old and new ethics

• Ethical governance in traditional research
  settings
• Whats new?
• Sensitivity to context
• Approaches to Internet research
• Gathering data directly from individuals
• Analyzing Interaction in Virtual Environments
• Internet as a Social Science Lab

3
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

4
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

5
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

6
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

7
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

8
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

9
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?

10
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

11
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

12
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 _at_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

13
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 ORiordan 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?

14
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

15
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?