I am planning to start an experimental study where I use social media posts as tweets and Facebook posts to ask Turkers if they believe the information posted in there or not. I will be manipulating some parts of the posts (i.e. the text, the URL, the image etc).
I plan to study the impact of these different elements of posts on the perceived credibility of health information (I establish factual truth of messages separately based on scientific evidence). Since asking people what elements of a tweet make a message more or less credible for them might not result in reliable answers (people might not know/ not be aware/ be biased by priming).
I have couple of questions regarding this study:
1- Ethical concerns: can I manipulate the tweets/facebook post before showing it to Turkers? Do I need a consent form from the users who posted these messages since I will be using their original text.
2- do I need to show the whole post as it is, I mean, I have seen studies were they just show the text without the frame or logo etc.
I would very much appreciate it if I can get references that explain how to do this the proper way. this is my first time doing an experimental study. I plan to do a pre and a post survey with the experiment. so any feedback/guideline would be very helpful.
Hello Aseel,
Try to get this book or e-book: Online social research : methods, issues & ethics -> http://ethics.iit.edu/eelibrary/node/4693
Hope it will assist you.
Rgds,
Dusan
Dear Aseel,
I think that ethical aspect is crucial. Probably, the best way is to assemble experimental group(s) and control group(s) and let them know about your research in advance before the experiment. However, you shouldn't tell them what group they assigned to. And, of course, you need to get consent from the users whose posts you are going to use.
Dear Aseel,
You might want to consider posts from news media and other public organisations/figures. The information in this sort of accounts is almost always public and there is less of a chance exposing private information about users.
Kind regards,
Iouliana
Dear Aseel Addawood,
In my opinion, a full scope of ethics should be used in this type of research. For the texts of entries used, posts inserted on social media portals, the standards of citation should be used in the same way as for scientific texts.
Best wishes
i think that using software of digital-media can facilitate our experimental studies.
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