My presentation at the Graduate School Media and Communication Colloquium (November 26, 2013) - please share if you care :-)

1. Anything Goes?!
Ethical Dimensions of Online Research
Nele Heise | Hans Bredow Institute Hamburg
GMaC Colloquium, University of Hamburg
November 26, 2013

2. Agenda
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Research ethics & ethical standards
Ethical aspects throughout the research process
»Hybridity« & particularities of online research
Informed Consent
Publication
Outlook
Heise | Online Research Ethics
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3. Research ethics?
Search for criteria to assess and decide upon »right behavior«
»Ethics are guidelines and principles that help us to up-hold our values – to
decide which goals of research are most important and to reconcile values and
goals that are in conflict. Ethical guides are not simply prohibitions; they also
support our positive responsibilities.«
Diener/Crandall (1978: 3)
Central dimensions of research ethics
(shared) value base, responsibility, ethical decision-making
Recommended Reading
Diener & Crandall 1978; Williams, Rice & Rogers 1988; Strohm Kitchener/Kitchener 2009; Fenner 2010
Heise | Online Research Ethics
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4. Ethical standards and research participants
 Voluntariness of participation as prerequisite
 Principle of »informed consent«
 Participant protection: Anonymity, Privacy, Do no harm
principle (avoiding potential risks)
 Legal context: personal rights (of third parties); data security
and privacy protection (e.g. »Bundesdatenschutzgesetz«);
(right of) informational self-determination as a normative
concept, an applied practice, required competence (Schmidt
2012); rights of third parties, e.g. Terms of Use
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5. (Some) ethical aspects throughout the research process
Recruitment
Data Collecting
Data analysis
Publication
Access to certain »spaces«, areas
Anonymization strategies
Visibility/authenticity strategies
Data security / storage
voluntariness / informed consent
Do no harm principle
Access to
Participants
(Inter)action /
behavior vs. Artifact
???
Anonymity vs.
Authorship
Transparency | Disclosure | Reciprocity
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6. »Hybridity« of online research contexts
Research
contexts
hybrid contexts
Use contexts
• ethical standards of research
• technical / methodological requirements of research
• research experience / practices and focus/subject
•
•
•
•
•
technical & social frames of media practices
characteristics of online communication
terms of use, providers’ rights
ethical argumentation, position, paradigm
fidelity & responsibility
• ethical principles of online communication
• (in)formal rules of play (e.g. netiquettes)
• media literacy/competence
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7. Ethically relevant dimensions of online research
 Web as a »science laboratory«: comprehensive logging and storage, richness
of data, accessible archive of communication and interaction processes
o Deeper insights into previously inaccessible areas, Lebenswelten, activities (e.g.
mapping of networks); ambivalence of certain methods, e.g. data mining, log file
analyses, profiling
 informational constraints: disembodiment, virtualization (textuality); degree
of social presence, anonymity (verification, identification/authentication)
o Need to »produce« visibility of researchers, disclosure of research (e.g. »fake
profiles«), passive forms of observation
 (spatial/temporal) de-contextualization, global reach of research and data
 Blurring boundaries of publicity and privacy (data, »spaces«)
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8. Stakeholders of ethical decision-making
Guidelines
Code of Ethics
Intermediaries
Figure in: McKee/Porter (2009: 17)
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9. Changing actor constellations
Researcher(s)
 Who interacts with whom/what?
Intermediaries
 Intermediaries implement their
own values and control the
horizon of possibilities
 New dependencies
 Terms of Use as a replacement
for informed consent?
User(s)
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10. Two important ethical questions
1. When – and by whom – is consent necessary throughout
the research process ?
2. As regards publication: what degree of data
anonymization is necessary?
Shameless self-promotion: Heise/Schmidt 2014; Heise 2013; Schmidt 2009
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11. Necessity of Informed Consent
1. What degree of publicity/privacy can be assumed?




Explicitly articulated expectations and self-descriptions (e.g. forums)
Evaluating the users‘ abilities and competences to assess certain aspects
Criteria: accessibility, sensitivity (data/information)
Prioritization of the user perspective
2. Research interest: Do you focus on behavior/action or artifacts?
3. Are providers (of what kind) involved?


Access to communicative spaces (Terms of Use, access restrictions)
Automated collection of platform data
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12. Necessity of Informed Consent
Visual heuristic to decide upon the necessity of informed consent; as in: McKee/Porter (2009: 132/136)
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13. Context matters
 Problem: Blurring boundaries of public/private
 Context (e.g. the »imagined audience«) influences produced data
and users‘ expectations
 Recording content/data as a (potential) violation of the
»contextual integrity« (Nissenbaum 2004), i.e. social norms – or
even Terms of Use
 Aggregation, combination, processing of content/data as a
(potential) violation of privacy (boyd 2010); informational selfdetermination, autonomy of participants?
Heise | »big data« & Forschungsethik 13

14. Context matters
Problem of »frictionless sharing« - what context?
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15. Publication of Findings
 Do no harm principle and privacy protection (accounts for every
type of publication, e.g. presentations)
 Challenges, e.g. searchability and linkability of data across services
and platforms, data persistence, variety of data formats
 Differentiation: owner/author/originator vs. »normal«
participants/users; aggregated vs. single data
 Possible solutions: »Data Fabrication« (Markham 2012), visual
paraphrases (W. Reißmann), word/tag clouds etc.
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16. Publication of Findings
Exemplary anonymization, see Heise/Schmidt (2014)
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17. Instead of a conclusion …
»There cannot be a blanket, whole cloth approach to Internet Research ethics.
Contextual details matter, including:
What … is the object of analysis of the study – texts, aggregated bits of information, or
the persons themselves?
What are the use expectations of the online site and of the online participants? What is
the sensitivity of the information collected? What are the ages, geo-cultural-political
affiliations, and/or technological expertise of the online participants?
In what form are the researchers collecting data, and in what forms are they redistributing it? Is the researcher using real names or real user/avatar names, quoting
passages, taking screenshots, etc.? And where will this material appear and to whom
will it be accessible?«
McKee/Porter (2009: 7f.)
Orientation needed?
ESOMAR Guidelines (esomar.org), DGOF Guidelines
(dgof.de), AoIR recommendations (2013), ADM quality criteria
(2011)
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18. Outlook and Open End
 With online research, ethical decision-making is more
complicated, e.g. due to de-contextualization, global reach, crosslinking and persistence of data, legal insecurities  growing need to
weigh technical feasibility and ethical tenability of online research
 »old« questions regarding the »rightness«, responsibilities and
consequences of research gain new relevance
 Upcoming Challenges:
o mobile devices; »Big Data«, geo-located data
o research related »online spaces«, App-based research, utilization of
APIs, design of research instruments/tools (opt-out/opt-in)
o Combination of datasets, »frictionless sharing«
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19. Thanks!
Nele Heise, M.A.
Hans Bredow Institute Hamburg
n.heise@hans-bredow-institut.de
@neleheise
www.neleheise.de

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