New technologies, new concerns: Negotiated ethics for a research community Geoffrey Lautenbach and Jacqueline Batchelor Department of Mathematics, Science, Technology & Computer Education University of Johannesburg, South Africa
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Abstract: With increased access to digital technologies and the omnipresent nature of social media applications and online services new concerns for ethical research practice arise. Currently children and youths are at the forefront of the adoption of new technologies along with naïve users and the digitally illiterate. With lessening degrees of support from parents, teachers and institutions, trusted information sources are becoming more difficult to find. Digital literacies and other 21 st century skills are now a necessity. Examining some of the ethical challenges that citizens now face in the digital world, this paper addresses questions on the applicability of current ethics policies governing research with human participants. In order to protect participants, and to promote ethically sound research, it has become essential to expand our thinking about the ethical and the legal aspects to also include the technical issues related to research.
BACKGROUND: WHEN THE TRADITIONAL ETHICS REVIEW IS NOT ENOUGH In an earlier study (Lautenbach & Batchelor, 2013) we reported on the conceptualization and design of a set of research ethics documents and procedures to streamline the task of ethical review by an Academic Ethics Review Board (Research Ethics Committee or REC) at a South African University. The motivating factors for redesigning these documents and procedures include emerging societal problems that impact on the current educational space and the demands of academia for ethical research practice. The electronic documents that were created addressed the four tenets of ethical research, namely respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. We also included issues related to research misconduct, vulnerability of participants, researcher responsibilities, legal issues, procedural issues, issues of language and writing style, as well as the scientific basis for doing the research in the first place - as poor science is in essence, inherently unethical. The 2013 conference paper emanating from this project offered REC members worldwide an insight into ethical issues and processes that may impact on all educational research done with human participants. It was also briefly noted in the final comments of the paper that the emerging issues around internet research ethics have also brought about the realisation that the existing e-documents have been suitably adapted for streamlining the ethical review process related to traditional research projects, but have not been adapted to accommodate research in the internet era. For this reason, the role of the REC and the thinking of the committee members must change to accommodate this phenomenon . In fact, recent research has shown that 75% of 700 RECs did not have a reviewer to review internet or computer-related research protocols, and, 75% of RECs did not provide training for their committee members in this field . This is entirely true of our REC except for two committee members, the authors of this paper, who are currently exploring the Internet research component and revising the procedural documents. These revisions and the accompanying training that will have to take place have, therefore, emerged as one of our biggest priorities to be addressed in the near future as part of the continuing professional development of researchers within the Faculty of Education. In this light we see ourselves as a “learning committee” who actively revise and change practices and procedures over time. According to Emanuel, the forthcoming 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Helsinki is “a perfect moment to reassess this fundamentally important document and revise its provisions to address many long-standing criticisms” . Likewise, we contend that it is a perfect moment to make improvements to the electronic ethics documents and procedures used by the REC to address ethics issues regarding emerging technologies. It is also a perfect moment to celebrate the ease and efficiency that technologies bring to the ethical review process, as well as the new challenges that make the world of the researcher so inherently exciting. Most importantly, we see the decision-making process in the REC as a collaborative task where we can all learn from one another through our diversity. concur that “this diversity of membership is founded on the idea that the committee needs and benefits from diverse and sometimes different points of view in the decision-making process which seeks consensus.”
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EdMedia 2014 - Tampere, Finland, June 23-26, 2014 reminds us that ethical relativism (the viewpoint that all ethical views are equally good) normally makes social cooperation impossible. In contrast, however, we need to stand together as a REC to decide collaboratively between right and wrong. Our collaboratively generated ethical principles and guidelines derived from this study should, therefore, be better received than individual opinions and interests. But before we can engage the REC committee and the various departments on these matters, we need to first do a thorough analysis of new technologies and their implications for research ethics.
NEW TECHNOLOGIES, NEW CHALLENGES In 1999, already predicted that what they called “persuasive technologies” would be commonplace, affecting many people in a variety of ways. Their appeal for rational thinking in this regard is still applicable now that we are surrounded by these technologies. The Internet has become an essential part of communication in modern society and increased usage and accessibility have led to the expansion of many online communities. It is in these communities that people with common interests transcend physical and geographical barriers by communicating with one another using the technologies at their disposal. The growing amount of possibly researchable data available on the Internet has made this resource a prime target for a variety of researchers. Some researchers wish to explore the dynamics of human interactions and their consequences, especially in social media forums. Others like have already provided a foundation from which to assess current findings and offer recommendations for future research on Facebook and online social networks but the problem remains that poor researchers are more interested in simply collecting a variety of data from a number of easily accessible sources at minimal cost. Obtaining these data is also much easier than in the past due to the nature of the technologies that can be harnessed for this purpose and accordingly there has been an increase in the number of Internet based studies. These range from large scale surveys on the social and psychological effects of Internet use at home and even a large scale study on Internet addiction to smaller scale investigations of specific cases related to social media use. Internet based research methods can include online surveys, web page content analysis, and analysis of e-conversations, videoconferencing, social networking sites, email, chat rooms, discussion boards and/or blogs . The main problem that needs to be explored is the ease with which technologies facilitate these investigations. Ethical and legal dimensions of such research and the ethical guidelines that need to be in place to address these issues must also be addressed. More issues that have emerged as a result of the advancement of technologies include the ability of both researchers and their sometimes unknowing, or non-consenting participants to assume anonymous identities online or even operate under a pseudonym. There are also issues related to obtaining informed consent, the illusion of privacy on the Internet, and the blurred boundaries between what is public and what is private. In fact, the reality that participants have communication rights, such as the right to access to information and the right to privacy at the same time, are often overlooked . As a result of this, questions arise about the applicability of current ethics policies governing research with human participants. In order to protect human participants, and to promote ethically sound research, it is obvious that we now need to expand our thinking about the ethical and the legal aspects, to also include the technical issues related to research.
A METHODOLOGY TO NEGOTIATE ETHICS IN A RESEARCH COMMUNITY This section reports on the educational design research process that was conceptualised to address the real world problem discussed above. This paper describes the early stages of this research project that was conducted in an existing, naturalistic educational situation where we plan to take the findings of the initial literature review and collaboratively explore each aspect with members of the five academic departments within an education faculty at a South African university. In doing so we will address a complex educational problem namely the implications of doing educational research in the technological era we currently find ourselves in. Of course we also need to project findings into the future to allow for technological innovations and advancement. This close interaction with departmental members will form the first series of interventions in this design-based research study and will be informed by theory (McKenney & Reeves 2014). Subsequent interventions will be flexible, and be refined and improved in each cycle (Wang & Hannafin, 2005) according to the needs of the various departments. We will then
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EdMedia 2014 - Tampere, Finland, June 23-26, 2014 attempt to step into the learning situation (Sandoval & Bell, 2004) and emphasize content and ethical research procedures in the subsequent iterations of the interventions planned for the participants. Going beyond simply promoting collaboration (Reeves, Herrington, & Oliver, 2005), we will give special attention to supporting human interactions between the departmental researchers, and their human participants. Although the ultimate objective of DBR is to derive design principles that can be implemented in future educational settings, familiar design principles should be the starting point hence the focus in this paper on finding design principles in the literature to initiate the process. Of course this study is still in its infancy and we can only report on the initial phase of the research process which involves an analysis of a practical problem, reading and exploring of the literature. Accordingly, this research project cannot currently be seen as a complete design experiment as the long term engagement with the participants to test the design principles will only begin in the next phase In other words, this paper only reports on the first phases of the DBR process as initially described by .
INITIAL FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION In phase one of the design-based research project one normally consults with, and investigates the target group being studied in order to derive draft design principles to be refined later in the research process. Accordingly, in this study we not only undertook a review of recent literature on the topic but also consulted the 2013 annual report of the REC in order to identify the types of studies undertaken within the Faculty of Education at the university. We did this in order to identify pertinent issues from research projects conducted in the past year and to get a better idea of the context in which educational research was done at the Faculty of Education in that year. A number of issues arose from this analysis of the annual report. Of particular concern is the number of applications that involved vulnerable groups and individuals susceptible to exploitation. In the 85 applications to conduct educational research that were reviewed by the REC in 2013 reference is made to: vulnerable adolescents in a residential care centre, gendered experiences of learners from child-headed families, children that have experienced trauma, children that continue to get bullied, children with learning disabilities, children with hearing difficulties, adolescents that self-harm, beauty concepts for girls in a Special Educational Needs School (SENS), experiences of orphans in SENS, young adults and service learning, and adolescent girls with depression to name but a few. Further contributing to the vulnerability of children in South Africa is the disintegration of traditional family structures. Parents and guardians have been replaced with caregivers and in extreme cases we experience child-headed households. More importantly, when conducting research on vulnerable participants using Internet-based research, the participants are even more vulnerable. Digitally illiterate adults cannot fully comprehend the complexity of online engagement themselves and this compounds the issue of providing guidance to already vulnerable children. Furthermore, educational researchers new to conducting research in online spaces still think that previously accepted standards of ethical conduct can transfer directly to accommodate for the complexities of the online spaces. Research also suggests that adult perception of solving online risks is viewed differently by the youth that actually use these services . Furthermore, almost all online technologies present some privacy and security issues. It should be noted that not all minors are equally at risk in online spaces and those that exhibit vulnerabilities in other areas of their life are most at risk to online exploitation. In other words, those at risk are prone to be even more at risk online. It is therefore of great importance to inform the educational research community regarding the increased defencelessness of research participants in online spaces. We contend that the most logical place to start this process is of course at the REC. suggested a survey of existing literature and practices regarding the conduct of Internet-based research in order to develop a taxonomy of ethical and legal issues, hence our focus on revisiting the most recent literature on the topic. An initial review of the literature has culminated in the refinement and distillation of the following principles to be used as a starting point for further investigation in this research project. Of course the normal criteria for assessing research ethics applications still apply, but the new items below also need to be considered.
Identify the participant – Traditional definitions of a human participant need to be reassessed. The blurred distinction between public and private domains raises the question of what is considered “private
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EdMedia 2014 - Tampere, Finland, June 23-26, 2014 information” in cyberspace . These authors also note the traceability of online communications and the amount of emotional investment that some people put into their online identities which challenge notions of what is considered “identifiable.” There is great investment in the development of online personas, and the question arises as to whether pseudonyms should be treated as real identities and hence, afforded the same types of confidentiality protection.
Explore the boundary between public and private - Some ethics scholars contend that data mining projects harvest publically available data so they do not meet the regulatory definition of human subject’s research , and therefore researchers should not have to gain approval from institutional review boards. However, this argument applies only to information that is publically available . In open-access forums like newsgroups and bulletin boards, informed consent may not always be required. The internet is usually considered a public place and public behaviour does not necessarily require informed consent .
Assess risks and benefits associated online research - Surveys or even observational research may be done where participants remain unaware of the researcher’s presence. Researchers should be made aware of possible benefits and harms to their participants that did not exist up to this point in time. Avoiding harm to others through good netiquette is essential .
Improve understanding of the vulnerabilities of participants – Even research involving international participants in online research makes this an important consideration. Cultural, social and political factors need to be considered . Geographical diversity may play a role.
Assess vulnerability of participants – New forms of vulnerability must be explored. Bias may play a role here . Other issues to consider include harassment, defamation, infringement of intellectual property rights .
Increase knowledge about the differences between Internet communities and physical communities. The question arises whether research on social media sites constitutes research with human subjects ?
Address issues related to access to technology
Explore online etiquette – mutual respect and rules of engagement contributing to society and human wellbeing
Investigate copyright, plagiarism, sharing, and permissions on each platform
Include new criteria for inclusion on the REC – At least 2 members should be familiar with Internet research and associated methodologies as well as online technologies or learning technologies.
Consider special certification for online research.
Incorporate training about Internet-based research into REC policy.
Explore the intricacies of ensuring informed consent - The traditional processes of obtaining informed consent can be upheld, though the format and medium for Internet-based research may differ . There are still ethical obligation to adequately inform users about the research, gain their consent, and protect their information .
Get to know user rights on various sites – Users must register and accept the terms of use on social media sites and certain user rights are explicitly protected by that site.
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Make use of credible resources online for guidance - For example, Internet Research Ethics (www.internetresearchethics.org) and any other resource that may be applicable to your specific context.
FINAL COMMENTS Internet research and research involving technologies and services online raises a number of complex issues for the researcher community, academia in general, research participants, and members of ethics review boards in particular. The initial findings provided here, in the form of basic criteria for RECs to consider, now need to be refined through the next phases of the design-based research (DBR) process. This should then shed more light on how seemingly simple and innocuous issues in the physical world can take on totally different qualities on the Internet and lead to ethical dilemmas. We as researchers need to understand the implications of each new technology in the research process if we are to ensure that effective mechanisms are in place to protect human participants and in order for this research to be most useful, we will firmly ground the rest of the research process in theories that provide an understanding of Internet technology and its impact on educational research. It is naturally very unrealistic to expect that any single set of guidelines from a study of this nature will ever cover all ethical situations concerning research with technology. This is because there is simply too much diversity to consider on the Internet and related services regarding cultures, values and specific contexts. Things that may seem ethical in one context, for example, may not be so in another context. This is why we are opting for this form of ‘negotiated ethics’ which can be grounded in the specifics of the research community that we serve. Furthermore, the principles we come up through this design-based approach will be negotiated collaboratively and will have true real-world relevance in our specific research context. As a REC we can then offer researchers advice and guidance on the ethical application of principles when using the Internet for research, knowing that the principles we promote come directly from the research community, are grounded in theory, and also make a meaningful contribution to both the theory and practice of educational research. The ethical guidelines we propose in this paper come from the initial phase of the DBR process and must now be tested in iterative phases of research in order to ultimately generate the design principles that will can guide the process of doing ethical research in the rapidly emerging technological landscape at the university. The great potential for these design principles to then be used as a mechanism for guiding interactions between researchers, online communities and research ethics committees (RECs) is also evident.
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