ethics – puzzling.org

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

In my years on the ‘net, I’ve seen any number of people want to interview others or get them to take surveys for everything from a short high school or undergraduate paper through to graduate research projects and books. And they so seldom manage to meet basic ethical guidelines for making sure they aren’t wasting their participants’ time at best or endangering them at worst. Hence this article.

In addition, this article may help research participants better assess requests: are researchers telling you what you need to know? Have they considered your interests as well as their desire to Find Something Out At All Costs?

Full disclosure: I am not a research ethics expert, I am simply a researcher helping you get the basics right. Please seek expert advice if you have any doubt about the safety or integrity of your research.

Why do I need to do this stuff?

Because you’re so often asking people sensitive stuff, that’s why!

Look, I have some sympathy for the “it’s just questions about something-seemingly-small!” myself. I ask people questions about their linguistic intuitions. “Which sentence reads better to you, A or B?” There’s nothing less fun than completing a 31 page ethics application to get approval to ask people about which sentences read better.

But look, all research, at best, takes up people’s time. You owe people something for that. In addition, quite a lot of the research people are recruiting for on the ‘net wants to get into harassment of women, political affiliations, sexual experiences, why people write slash. That kind of stuff? That kind of stuff in the wrong hands loses people jobs and relationships. You owe people serious, well thought out harm mitigation for that.

So, ethical research recruitment lets people know what they’re getting into, whether it is a boring half hour sharing linguistic intuitions, or sharing potentially damaging information with a reseracher.

The bare minimum

All researchers asking for participation should share this information:

Who are you?
Who do you work for or who commissioned this work, if not yourself?
How can I get in contact with you, and how can I get in contact with who you are working for?
What is the purpose of the research?
What is the status of the research? Is this sheer curiosity that made you whip up a survey in five minutes, or a pilot study, or the main game?
What kind of effort do you want from me? (Interviews versus surveys. Five minutes versus many hours. You get the idea. Tell me upfront what my time investment is.)
When you’re done, where can I see the results?
Will the results be made public and in what form? (A peer-reviewed article? A PhD thesis? A pop science book? On your blog?)

Some of this might be the sort of thing you want to put on a webpage you can link to, so you can leave short advertisements like “Hi, I’m looking for help with X, and thought readers here might want to help because of Y, if you need to know more, please see LINK.”

You;d be amazed how many people miss the “When you’re done, where can I see the results?” step. Even if they’re asking people for 20 hours of interviews or something like that. For anything but the most trivial investment of time, letting people read your results is the minimum reward required.

Also, results being made public can often be good: the subject’s work is contributing to the sum of human knowledge! So don’t consider this necessarily a bad thing in and of itself.

Institutional research

If you are doing research at the postgraduate, postdoctoral or faculty level, research using human subjects (and other animal subjects for that matter, but you aren’t likely to be recruiting them on blogs) requires ethics approval by an institution-level ethics committee in most institutions.

So, when soliciting participants for research that has ethics approval, provide the following info:

All the bare minimums plus
A statement citing your ethics approval in whatever manner is usual. Your committee probably has boilerplate. Typically this will name the institution, give a reference number for your experiment and provide contact details for the ethics committee.
If your ethics committee approved a recruitment advertisement, use it! If it’s long put it at the other end of a link if that’s OK with them.
If your ethics approval requires that you disclose a bunch of things, also state them or place them at your info link if allowed.

If your institutional research didn’t require ethics approval (some institutions might, for example, have a blanket policy covering low-risk things like linguistic intuition questionnaires) find whatever boilerplate they let you use instead, if there is any or say something sensible along the lines of “This questionnaire comes under the XYZ University Low Risk Experimentation Policy [link].”

Basically, if you are doing research on behalf of an employer state either that you have ethics approval, or if not, why not (eg, your institution has no committee).

No committee but doing something sensitive?

If you’re doing sensitive work outside the oversight of ethics committees, here’s the start of your checklist!

All the bare minimums plus
Are respondents going to be anonymised in your personal/researcher copy of the data? Are you stripping any associated names, IP addresses, email addresses and similar? If not, what are you keeping and why?
How are you storing the researcher copy of the data?
Who has access to the researcher copy of the data? (Yourself? Your boss? All of your boss’s present and future employees? The Internet?)
When do you plan to delete the researcher copy of the data, if ever?
Are respondents going to be anonymised in the published results? If not, what identifying information will you publish and why?
Can a respondent withdraw their participation and be deleted from your data or transcripts? How do they do it? How long do they have to do so?

There are all kinds of other factors that ethics committees would get you to look at, basically, what capacity for harm does your research have? How are you mitigating that harm? What risk to your participants is left?

Risks include: physical health risks; mental health risks (more common with online data gathering, eg, triggering questions); exposing people to relationship disruption or breakdown, or abuse (by, eg, asking them to discuss infidelity); exposing people to criminal prosecution (eg by asking them to discuss illegal drug use); exposing people to civil liability (eg by getting them to discuss breach of contract), exposing them to job loss; denying them the best treatment or resources (by, eg, giving preferential treatment to patients or students or employees who agree to take part in the research, thus harming others); and coercing participation in general. And there’s one question that frankly stands out to me as a member of the apparently rare species Lady on the ‘Net, which is “are you studying an over-studied population and if so, what benefit does this extra research have for them, as opposed to for you?”

One of the most obvious mitigation strategies is anonymity of your subjects in reports, and eventual data destruction of any private identifying data. But as you can see from the examples related to coerced participation, it isn’t the only strategy you might need. List your possible harms, list your mitigations, let the potential subjects decide if the research is worth it to them.

I wrote a similar post focussed on software development a few years back, in that case mainly focussed on “prove to your subjects that their participation is not a waste of their time.”

Mary’s helpful guide to soliciting research participation on the ‘net by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Most of this entry is exactly a year old today and it’s just sat around in draft form all that time. Since I posted something similar on Geek Feminism about research into women in tech and similar topics, I thought I’d get it out there.

In January 2009 a researcher named Anne Chin of Monash University Law emailed the chat list for the linux.conf.au 2009 conference asking for research subjects to be interviewed about licencing and Open Source software. There were several responses criticising her use of HTML email and Microsoft Word attachments. I’ll leave the specifics of this alone except that people should be (and probably are) aware that this is almost always an unknowing violation of community norms.

I did, though, think about making some notes on research ethics and Free Software research. A bit about my background: I am not a specialist in ethics. I’m somewhat familiar with ethics applications to work with human subjects, but not from the perspective of evaluating them. I’ve made them, and I’ve been a subject in a study that had made them.

For people who haven’t seen this process, the ethical questions arising from using human subjects in your research in general covers the question of whether the good likely to arise from the outcomes of the study outweighs the harm done to the subjects, together with issues of consent to that harm. (There are many philosophical assumptions underlying this ethical framework, I don’t intend to treat them here.) Researchers in universities, hospitals, schools and research institutes usually have to present their experimental designs to an ethics committee who will determine this question for them and approve their experiment. Researchers who work across several of these (eg, a PhD student who wants to interview schoolchildren) will need to do several ethics applications, a notable chore when the forms and guidelines aren’t standardised and occasionally directly conflict. Researchers working for private commercial entities may or may not have a similar requirement. Researchers who use animals also have to have ethical reviews, these are done by animal ethics committees, which are usually separate.

At my university, essentially any part of your research that involves measuring or recording another person’s response to a research question and using it to help answer that question needs a human ethics application.

The good/harm balance may include very serious dilemmas: is there a health risk to subjects? how will the researcher manage the conflict between maintaining subject confidentiality and research integrity and the good of her subjects or the requirements of the law if she uncovers, say, episodes of abuse or violence? But it also involves less immediately obvious and serious ethical questions. Is this study a giant waste of subjects’ time? is considered a question of ethics by ethics committees, and is in fact the most serious problem for linguistics research, since there’s very seldom an outcome of particular interest to the subjects themselves.

The study in which I took part a few years back was towards the serious end actually: it was a study into the psychological profiles of people who have an immediate family member who had cancer as a child and involved both questionnaires and a phone interview with a psychologist. Both because the study explored memories of the illness and because the profiling included evaluating depressive episodes, suicidal ideation and so on, it came with a detailed consent form and with information about a counselling service that had been informed of the study and was prepared to work with its subjects.

In the case of the Free Software community the ethical questions are often more towards the waste of time? end of the spectrum than the more immediately serious end. It’s important to understand that this isn’t necessarily the case though. Here are some more cutting ethical problems:

getting findings that expose your subjects and/or their employers to intellectual property claims; or
revealing that your subjects are breaching employment contracts in some way (generally also related to IP) and thus exposing them to job loss and possible civil action.

Getting ethics approval to carry out workplace studies can be fairly hard precisely due to problems like these. But in the rest of this post I will treat the waste of time problem.

Firstly the basics: are your subjects going to be identifiable in your final reports or to the general public? If not, who will know who they are? Can a subject opt to have their responses removed from the study? When and how? All this should be explained at the start. (Usually if an ethics committee has been involved, there’s a consent form.) If doing a survey look into survey design, in order to construct non-leading questions and such.

Now, for specifics. Most of them arise from this principle: there are a lot of researchers working, in various ways, on the Free Software community, possibly making it a slightly over-studied group if anything. This places the onus on the individual researcher to demonstrate to the community that their project is worthwhile and that they’re going to do what they say. Thus:

demonstrate some familiarity with the background. Depending on your research level this could mean anything from demonstrating a knowledge of existing anthropological work on Free Software (say, if the research project is for your anthropology PhD) down to at least understanding the essential concepts and core history (say, a project at high school level). This can be demonstrated by research design, eg asking sensible well-informed questions, but actually mostly requires a bigger time investment: making appearances in the community, either virtually or physically, ideally for a little time before asking the community to help you get your PhD/A-grade/pass.
don’t get the community to design your experiment for you. Have a specific goal, more specific than get people to write me lengthy essays about Free Software, and get ideas from that and write about them. In the general case, the ask people incredibly vague stuff and hope they say something interesting technique fails the waste-of-time test.
give your results back to the community. The most common problem with the various surveys, interviews and questionnaires sent to the Free Software community is that responding to them is like shouting into a black hole. It is not unheard of, of course, to see the thesis or essay or roundup that comes out of these, but it is unusual, relative to the number of requests. Most of the time the researcher promptly disappears. Researchers should come to the Free Software community with an explanation of when and where they will make the results of the study available. They should explain the aims in advance unless this would compromise the results. (On that note: Anne Chin is giving a linux.conf.au talk this year.)

Ethics of Free Software community research by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Tag: ethics

Mary’s helpful guide to soliciting research participation on the ‘net

Why do I need to do this stuff?

The bare minimum

Institutional research

No committee but doing something sensitive?

Related

Ethics of Free Software community research