In a presentation on research methods I gave some years ago in an international meeting, I referred to an in-progress study I was conducting as an example. The study consists of data from different social media (n=2,080 interactions) produced spontaneously as reactions to a topic I was investigating. However, a British colleague drew my attention to getting the consent of all the writiers on these media so that my study would be ethical! I reacted immediately and said: "this is another issue that can be discussed later!" but, actually, I was wondering how I could get such consents from so many unknown people!!
When you are processing data that has become public (video, podcast, photos, data on social media, written products such as blogs, ...) for research purposes and you cite the source(s) of the data at hand, do you still have to get consent to be ethical?
That's a very good question which has received a lot of publicity especially with the recent breach of data between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook data, and has subsequently sparked a huge (as yet inconclusive) discussion as to who and under which circumstances should use/analyze/share the data posted. Here's some food for thought:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/psychologylse/2018/04/17/the-importance-of-informed-consent-in-social-media-research-2/
Dear Maria D. Avgerinou
Thank you for the interesting link. I have read the blog and I am reading the article by the same author. However, the feeling I have had thus far after reading a big part of the content of the two publications is "you need an informed consent but we do not know how to get it!". As you said, it is inconclusive and more discussion is needed!
More to come ...
AB
A good response from Maria. Abdelmajid - while you state that your study was undertaken several years ago - I get the impression that you may not have sought ethical consent for the data collection. While the overall picture is still murky and grey as it is public data - my advice is that all researchers seek ethical approval from their local institutions and see what advice is given. If local consent is given then there should be no repercussions.
Really great question! I sit on a human research ethics committee and this is a regular discussion. My personal views are that it is context specific. My preference is to apply for an opt-out approach to consent. In this situation I would write to administrators of groups (if this is your target audience) requesting permission to conduct research in that group, and post information on the page about the research I'm doing. If you're doing it through your account I would put up the same research information so people connected to you can see it. If people don't want to be included in the sample they can contact you and you can exclude their posts from your data set. But I know of other researchers who have applied for a waiver of consent for publicly available information as well. It is certainly a grey area!
Dear Julia, Dean and Kaukab
Many thanks for your replies. I understand I should ask for permission or at least declare that I am interacting, or motivating others to interact, for research purposes. But my story is different. A Minister in my country gave a declaration which resulted in a lot of buzz online especially on social media. Some people voiced their views about this controvercial declaration in articles which were widely commented. I collected these comments five days after the release of each article. The articles appeared in seven different social media. Now, if I want to have the consent to use this data, I wonder who I should ask and how?
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