Is a question we debated in last weeks small groups. Personally I think that it is Ethical to conduct research on the internet in some cases. For example, if a researcher is wanting to use a sample of anonymous blogs on the internet to find out how what the average student did during freshers week at university. They could find a set of student blogs online and take the relevant information from those blogs without the writers of the blogs ever knowing.
A report by the BPS “Report of the Working Party on Research on the Internet” sets out the ethical rights and wrongs of using information found on the internet. If there are guidelines for it, couldn’t it be argued that it’s been deemed to be okay by the majority so it’s okay to do?.
The report highlights several key issues when dealing with ethics and the internet. Firstly Verifying identify. The report says that because there is no contact between the participants and the researcher it is hard to verify the writer is exactly who they say they are. I believe that although this could be a problem in a few cases of people pretending to be someone else the vast majority of people will probably be who they say they are, so the data collected could still be of value. The people who may not be who they say they are would be outliers, and everyone knows that outliers can crop up!.
I think an advantage of not being able to identify all participants is that participants then have confidentiality nobody would ever know that if was you mentioned in a report. This protects the participant for any harm because the likely hood of anyone finding out it was them is slim. Unless you’re a stalker and that’s just frankly a bit weird….
( I really wanted to add a picture, and this made me laugh)
The second and I think the biggest support for using information on the internet is public/private space. Most people know that the information they post online will be available to other people to read at any time, it could be a few hours after it’s been written or it could be years. If you’re posting things on the internet I believe it’s a risk you have to take, anyone could be using the things we have typed. Even our statistics blogs, they could take what we’ve written and pass it on as they own work. It’s a gamble we all take.
Finally, if you’re getting your data from the internet you can always ask for consent from the people you want to take the information from. Blogs have comment sections to leave your researchers details, email, there are many ways to get in touch to make sure they are okay with you using there information. This also allows you to debrief participants so that if anyone was against you using anything of theirs, show them where it was published/results. Allowing them to come to you if they had any problems.
I do however think there would be some things that you couldn’t do when taking data from the internet, such as revealing deeply personal information about a participant without gaining consent first, or revealing a participants name to keep anonymity.
Hope people enjoyed this post, it’s written on no sleep so if it’s not that great sorry!
statstastic 
Your post highlights some of the main issues with conducting internet research, and includes a very important mention for the BPS’s literature on the subject. However, I can’t fully agree with “If there are guidelines for it, couldn’t it be argued that it’s been deemed to be okay by the majority so it’s okay to do?” being a useful argument. Although probably not wrong, it does represent an approach that we should attempt to avoid when considering ethics.
The problem with ethics, as I see it, is that it’s never clear-cut. Never black and white. Never Coke and Pepsi. Although guidelines such as these existing would imply that SOME internet research is acceptable, each study should definitely be considered on its own. It may be fine to do an anonymous review of chatroom logs to gauge people’s views on (for example) immigration, but conduct similar research using the exact same approach on the conversations of abuse victims sharing coping strategies and you may well raise a few eyebrows. If you ever got ethical approval in the first place. It is complacent and potentially dangerous to adopt the “it’s been done before so it’s fine” stance, and researchers ought to be discouraged from doing so.
Overall, though, I do agree that internet research is largely ethical and also very beneficial. Many internet sources contain data that is in the public domain, and even if this is not explicitly stated then most authors would have no issue with your using their stuff anonymously, as long as you made reasonable attempts to request permission.
A good post, and I’m sorry for sounding argumentative – it’s just for the marks :).
Sam
Hey this is my fav blog this week 🙂 it was really clever using what we discussed in small groups and i think you have made your ponts clear and well dont for bringing the BPS into things because we all know how important that is!! well done
maybe you could have included a research paper << only bit of critizism 🙂
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Your post highlights many benefits to conducting research on the internet, however, i think there are a few more negatives that need to be looked at. For example, what about informed consent? I know people have argued that by posting it on the internet it is public and therefore they have already given consent, however, the problem is INFORMED consent. For example, i am posting this now as part of a stats class, if it was used in an experiment, it would not have been formed consent as i would have no idea that it was being ussed for that purpose. Another issue is a participants right to withdraw. If i dont know it’s being used in an experiment, how is it possible for me to withdraw from it? Just a couple of point there, other than that, a great blog x 🙂
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Firstly, I thought this was a fantastic blog; you discussed an area which not many people would think of and yet you manage to bring in relevant arguments such as ethical standards. I agree with you that one major advantage of internet research is confidentiality of the participants, an obvious important ethical standard which must be strictly adhered to. However, I believe you needed to include some negative criticisms. For example, you mention how research can remain on the internet for years on end. One of the disadvantages of this is that research can become dated, with more recent research surpassing previous findings, otherwise, well done.
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This is a really good blog and I liked the fact that you brought in many of the ideas mentioned in the seminar, whilst also introducing new ones.
I agree that when information is put on to the internet, we instantly create the opportunity for others to access it, whether it be a prospective employer or someone looking to use your information for research. However, I do feel that if the opportunity to contact the person who’s information a researcher wants to use is present, then they should make some effort, even just a short e-mail or blog comment, to inform/ask the person.
The only small criticism that I have is that you’ve slightly stuck to the positive side of using data from the internet, so maybe you could introduce some negative ideas from the other side of the argument!
Overall though, I really agree with your points!
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I think this topic is an interesting one and one that isnt given much thought- infomation is so easily accessible over the internet and lots of people are not as cautious with their personal infomation as they should be
This is why im not sure that i agree with your point that it is ethically acceptable to access and use information that you find from the internet. I’m in the opinion that without expressed consent that you shouldn’t use any information found online. Unless you choice to be anonymous online confidentiality will always be an issue.
Personally i think that this is definitely an area that should be examined more, especially in this day and age of social networking and internet use- ethical guidelines should be created purposefully for information collected from the internet.
I really enjoyed your blog and thought it was a really interesting topic. Although I agree with your main point that it would be anonymous this isn’t entirely correct. When submitting your paper/results/study you have to include evidence of where you got the data from, hence you would be revealing identity. Maybe only of the blogs name or whatever but it wouldn’t be entirely anonymous and could actually give more details away than a participant identity of ek19a0 for example which you would get in an experiment. You would have to show where you got the evidence from otherwise you could just make it up. By using the internet you also can’t determine certain situations and extraneous variables which may have occurred affecting data. Also although you are right it is in the public domain it is a necessity to gain consent first. I suppose in a way though that using the internet to gain information is just like performing field experiments. However, I really enjoyed your blog! 🙂