Did your research involve asking people questions or asking them to fill out surveys? Or was it a literature review/ text-based study?

Any involvement of humans as "test subjects" needs ethical approval, or a formal ruling that the research is exempt from ethical approval. While this sounds like two different routes, practically it is basically the same thing: you identify your local ethics committee and submit a description of your research to them, and they'll either say approved, exempt, or not approved with the possibility to resubmit after changes.

However, if you are researching, for example, current political sentiments in a country and using newspaper articles, internet blogs, historical documents, etc. as a tool to answer your research questions, you probably do not need ethical approval as the authors made these documents publicly available and you do not have a data protection issue.

Thank you for your detailed answer. Yes, my reseach included anonymous online survey. So, it seems, I should address the local ethical committee.

I agree that it would be wise to apply to your ethics committee, but I suggest that you request an exemption for this research, because it is both anonymous and entirely voluntary.

Thank you David! I am beginning to figure out what it is that I need to do.

If you plan to publish your research, most journals will ask for a statement that your procedures were approved by an ethics review board.

In addition to David Morgan's suggestion, your study might qualify for expedited review, which is a faster process than a full Institutional Review Board (IRB) process and provides documentation of ethics approval for use in publication. A request for expedited review usually involves completing a separate application from a full application. Whether the study requires expedited review over request for an exemption can be clarified by your institution's IRB contact person. In the case of an exemption, request that the IRB provides written approval of the exemption.

Rules around ethical reviews for research are changing continually. They are becoming more strict and not less strict. For research using the internet or social media, new rules are being developed. The issue is dat you are building a set of data that is more than the sum of individual responses, and these data sets deserve extra protection, or are subjected to data protection rules.

This has been discussed in the literature. When I am on my desktop computer, I will send a few references.

Even if you used only documents from the public domain, you would need to substantiate your claim of not needing an ethical review by referencing appropriate literature.

Nearly all journals ask for a certificate from an Ethical review committee. It is a lot of work, but usually it will help you in your thesis with the methodology chapter and your ethical paragraph.

There was a quote somewhere about what happens to those who forget the past, but I forgot where I saw it, anyway I found these two references that might be of help as to why an ethical review is important, one is the prisoner experiment which shows how brutality can get out of control of the controllers, and the other is about administering fake shocks to see who follows orders when those orders are given by authority:

https://www.prisonexp.org

https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

I suppose I should add, that if you did your work under the auspices of a for-profit corporation, you would not necessarily need any ethics review, but you might not have trouble publishing due to proprietary information.

Dear Varvara,

Check your university’s Ethical code policy, your own department and the Department of Social Psychology if that is the discipline your present research covers. Nearly all journals require an Ethical Review certificate.

Universities have become more strict about this, also because research funders have become more strict, including governments.

In some countries, the government or financing ministerie warns that if research is done without the necessary ethical review, then the whole department’s funding is cancelled and in some cases the whole university’s funding is cut off. This puts a very heavy pressure on ERC’s (ethical review committees) to treat all research the same and not to be light-handed with some. It has become very bureaucratic in some cases and time consuming. But if you don’t do it properly, you may have to discard whole pieces of work. That happened to me, I had to discard a pilot research of in depth interviews because I could not show signed consent forms. The emails asking for permission to interview and the positive replies were not considered in any way valid. The interviewees were not a vulnerable group but high ranking seniors in their field, however, their email consents did not fit the official criterium of a formal consent form on university letter paper, referring to a university complaint procedure and whistle blower telephone number!

Better safe than sorry.

References on ethical aspects of online research as well as research on documents from the public domain.

Fogel, C, Quinlan, A, Quinlan, L, She, Q. (2010.) Ethical issues in socio-historical archival research: a short skit. Research Ethics Review (2010) Vol 6, No 3, pp. 91–94

Markham, A, & Buchanan, E. (2012). Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research: Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0). Association of Internet Researchers, including members of the AoIR Ethics Working Group. http://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf

I hope you find this useful.

for every researcher the ethical review committee approval is important check the ORIC system code from your university and department of psychology

Thanks for all the answers. I applied to the ethics committee yesterday and I hope to get the decision in a month.