Week 5

Question: How does conducting research on the Internet impact the ways that researchers must deal with human subjects?

The breadth of technologies that comprise the Internet and the global potentiality of the audience bring challenges to the traditional norms of social research involving human subjects. New mediums and contexts for communicative events expand the possibilities for research while engendering questions about the potential such research has to bring harm to subjects.

In one sense, the Internet opens new “ways” (approaches) to conduct research. The SBR course presented a list of new or expanded approaches to social research dealing with human subjects that included: (1) allowing surveys to be conducted without the cost of mailing, (2) expanding the pool of research subjects beyond the local community, (3) introducing new frames of reference to study personal and group communications (e.g. e-mail and social networking sites), and (4) providing the opportunity to observe human communicative processes in a new culture (the Internet).

With these opportunities, researchers are faced with technical, legal, and ethical questions concerning the “way” they deal with subjects and the methods they use to obtain, protect, and present research data on the Internet. A non-inclusive summary of the issues peculiar to Internet-based research is presented below.

1. Questions of Public Versus Private
Many people would say that the observance of an online community is the same as viewing a public event (the behavior of a group is being observed). If this view of “public” implies that no aspect of individual behavior is identified and quantified in the research, is it even research? If the answer is no, the reverse implication is that social research involving human subjects communicating through the technologies on the Internet (including images, videos, and audio recordings) will always involve the subject of privacy. The determination of the expectation of privacy of participants in a communicative situation and the potential for harm from research are the major concerns.

Some researchers may consider information public (available for examination without prior consent) unless access to the communications is limited by password or invitation. This view seems to have some merit in that limited access could imply the expectation of a certain degree of privacy by the participants. This presumed expectation could guide the actions of the researcher as they attempt to define the potential for harm from research.

2. Questions of Autonomy
Diminished autonomy is a principle by which research is limited or disallowed by application of criteria of age (before the age of consent) or capacity (diminished physical or mental capacity limiting certain social interactions). Verification of questions of autonomy is typically not possible in many areas of Internet communications. Therefore, this principle seems to limit observations to postings of individuals who have given the researcher personal consent or to cases where consent has been obtained from a guardian. Personally, I question the observance of individuals who are limited in technical knowledge to the degree that they do not comprehend that very few “conversations” on the Internet are private.

3. Questions of Determining Identity
Research reports may attempt to protect the identity of individuals by using pseudonyms to associate research data with a subject. Search engines have the potential of invalidating this methodology. Depending on how the data is gathered and presented, a search could identify the subject (e.g. an unidentified subject is quoted in a research report and the text can be found in its original context by a web search).

Users are often identified by “screen names” on social sites. In such cases, the researcher is faced with the question of whether the data from the source actually represents a member of the research population. Since identity theft is common in the digital age, the argument could be made that no method of communication on the Internet can guarantee that the sender is actually the person that is being represented.

4. Questions of Preserving Privacy and Confidentiality
If a subject responds to a researcher with personal data via E-Mail, there can be questions of security of the data on the sending computer, during the transmission of the data to and from a server, and on the receiving computer. On-line questionnaires can also be vulnerable due to the presence of malicious software on the user computer or due to hacker attacks on the host system. Vulnerability of data storage is another issue that must be addressed by the researcher. Data encryption is one method of addressing such questions.

5. Questions of Research Design
Computer-based response forms used in research (when the subject and data are correlated) must allow a subject to exit the “test” at any time, must not force the respondent to answer every question, and must destroy any data from an abandoned test. This is a matter of respect.

6. Questions of Creating Unwanted or False Association
If a researcher uses a group E-Mail to solicit subjects from a population for research on a socially sensitive subject, some recipients of the mailing may feel stigmatized by their inclusion in the mailing. Any anomaly in the research process that has the potentiality of identifying an individual in relation to a group (as belonging or not belonging) must be eliminated if the association or disassociation could cause harm.

7. Questions of Consent, Knowledge, and Comprehension
In low risk cases, the intent and methods of research may be explained to potential subjects on a website. Volunteers for the study could acknowledge their consent to the research process by following a link to the test page(s). When the life style of a participant could be at risk from the disclosure of research data or a participant could be at risk of psychological distress from participation in a test, more stringent methods are needed to explain the research procedures and document consent. It would seem appropriate that the methodology of the process and the nature of questions should be explained to the individual by a secure method (fax may be the best method). There must be a mechanism to test the user’s comprehension of the information and a method to ensure that the person can legally give consent and is the one giving the consent.

8. Questions of Ownership
There are varying opinions on the ownership of materials presented on the Internet. Is an image displayed on a social-networking site the property of the person that posted it? If this were the case, it would also seem that the creative thoughts expressed in a blog are in the same realm of relationship. Though it may be errant, this thought pattern would suggest that the publication of a portion of the contents from a blog or an image from an individual’s site in a research document without full citation would be an infringement of ownership rights. If this were the case, would the need for documentation of rightful ownership and the need for anonymity ever collide in research?

Such questions (except for the mental wanderings of number eight) are representative of the issues that are part of the assessment process that a researcher must undertake to ensure that he or she adequately and ethically protects the rights, autonomy, and privacy of a subject and does not inflict harm to their person or their lifestyle. Truly, the answers to these questions appear to me to be difficult to resolve with any degree of universal validity. I was able to find documents that attempted to address these issues on the websites of universities and professional associations. They exhibited the type and extent of thought that is necessary to define even the most rudimentary guidelines for social research involving human subjects on the Internet.