Oxford e-Social Science Project
Law and Ethics in e-Social
Sciences
Annamaria Carusi
Christopher Millard
Marina Jirotka

Workshop Agenda
9:30 - 9:50 Introduction and Background
Annamaria Carusi & Marina Jirotka
9:50 - 10:15 Legally Compliant Use of Personal Data in e-Social Science
Chritopher Millard
10:15 - 10:40 Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data Sets
Libby Bishop
10:40 - 11:00 Break
11:00 - 11:25 Anonymisation and Pseudonymisation in Large Data Sets for
Medical Research
David Trower
11:25 - 11:50 Ethical Challenges for Social Networking Research
Bernie Hogan
11:50 - 12:50 Roundtable Discussion: Privacy on the Next Generation Internet
12:50 - 13:00 Conclusion

Data in e-Social Science
 Data use, reuse
 Data access, archiving and deposit,
management
 Data mining and aggregation
 Qualitative and quantitative research

Ethical challenges
 Internet enables tools and services that create
new opportunities for social science
 Also open up gaps and indeterminacies in
traditional or current practices
 Of social science
 Of social living
 Ethical boundaries of both are stretched,
extended, interrogated, challenged

Institutional challenges
 Lack of understanding of Institutional Research
Review Boards
 Application of medical model to social science
research -- always a problem and limitation but
especially in this domain
 Tensions with personal or disciplinary ethics
 Tensions with requirements of funding bodies or
with legal requirements

Legal challenges
 Personal data
 Legal requirements regarding
anonymisation and pseudonymisation
 Legal requirements regarding aggregation
 Legal jurisdiction

Methodological and
Disciplinary Challenges
 Anonymisation and the usefulness of data
 Relationships with research participants
 Disciplinary orientations towards data
 Challenge to the way in which social
science claims are validated

Social Science Data:
the bigger picture
 Ethics does not only pertain to possible re-
identification of an individual
 Cultural differences regarding whether privacy is
of an individual or of a group (a family, a
business, a clan)
 Ethics also pertains to:
 Representation as
 Engendering or production of representation (how
does a representation come to have the features that
it does have?)
 Purposes and goals

Techno-social science
 How can the possibilities of e-Social
Science be exploited in order to produce
an ethically pro-active and productive
mode of social science?

Thank you!
annamaria.carusi@oerc.ox.ac.uk
christopher.millard@oii.ox.ac.uk
marina.jirotka@oerc.ox.ac.uk
Carusi, A. (2008) Data as Representation: Beyond Anonymity in e-Research
Ethics, International Journal of Internet Research Ethics, 1 (1).
Carusi & Jirotka (2009) From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth, Qualitative
Research, 9 (3).