From "a Fair Game" to "a Form of Covert Research": Research Ethics Committee Members' Differing Notions of Consent and Potential Risk to Participants Within Social Media Research.

R A Hibbin,G Samuel,G E Derrick

doi:10.1177/1556264617751510

Abstract

Social media (SM) research presents new challenges for research ethics committees (RECs) who must balance familiar ethical principles with new notions of public availability. This article qualitatively examines how U.K. REC members view this balance in terms of risk and consent. While it found significant variance overall, there were discernible experience-based trends. REC members with less experience of reviewing SM held inflexible notions of consent and risk that could be categorized as either relying on traditional notions of requiring direct consent, or viewing publicly available data as “fair game.” More experienced REC members took a more nuanced approach to data use and consent. We conclude that the more nuanced approach should be best practice during ethical review of SM research.

Highlights

Social media (SM) provides a new methodological research tool allowing researchers to draw on data from websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as password-protected and non–password-protected chatrooms and forums (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010)
All research ethics committees (RECs) members were aware that when explicit consent had not been sought from SM users, applying the “do no harm” principle was complicated by the presence of SM data being seemingly freely and publicly available
This study demonstrates that REC members hold broad conceptualizations of risk and consent in SM research, and it goes on to empirically study how these conceptualizations are brought into the ethical decision-making process via the views of individual REC members with differing and varied opinions of how consent and risk are to be applied in the SM context (Samuel, 2017)

Summary

Introduction

Social media (SM) provides a new methodological research tool allowing researchers to draw on data from websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as password-protected and non–password-protected chatrooms and forums (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). The benefits of this research center on the huge repository of accessible, seemingly public data, available at low cost. Different views on the publicly available nature of SM platforms and the perceived privacy of SM users present an ethically gray area for research ethics committees (RECs) charged with ensuring that research using SM data is conducted responsibly and ethically.. Researchers’ responsibilities to their research participants are outlined in a range of disciplinary codes of conduct (BERA: British Psychological Society [BPS], 2010; Jones, 2011), and in the off-line context, these responsibilities have clear boundaries that are familiar to researchers and RECs alike (Hedgecoe, 2016). In the context of SM research, new challenges that obscure the “fundamental rights of human dignity, autonomy, protection, safety, maximization of benefits and minimization of harms” As such, when ostensibly publicly available data are collected without SM users’

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Conclusion