New ethical guidelines for Social Media Research published

Hayley Lepps is a Researcher at NatCen Social Research

Earlier in the year I was invited to attend a two-day workshop hosted by the University of Aberdeen, as part of their ESRC‐funded project “Social Media, Privacy and Risk: Towards More Ethical Research Methodologies”. 

The workshop was attended by some of the leading thinkers & practitioners in social media research, and based on our experiences and research (including my own work on NatCen's “Research using Social Media: Users’ Views” project), we aimed to develop a set of flexible guidelines for the ethical use of social media data in research, intended to be used by researchers, students, ethics committees, funding bodies, and anyone else with an interest in the ethics of working with social media data. Following the workshop, the outputs were then pulled together by the team at Aberdeen, and the draft guidelines were discussed at the AcSS/ NSMNSS conference on ethics and social media research. 

I was very happy to see the guidelines published last week; I would very much recommend anyone interested in conducting ethical social media research gives them a read, and I hope they provide a useful contribution to ongoing debates and best practice in ethical social media research in the social sciences. You can find the final version of the guidelines here: www.dotrural.ac.uk/socialmediaresearchethics.pdf

Things that keep me awake at night: ethical considerations when researching fan communities online

Milena Popova is a PhD researcher at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, UWE Bristol. She is researching approaches to sexual consent in fanfiction and online fan communities. She tweets as @elmyra and blogs about her research at pornresearcher.eu.

My PhD research focuses on depictions of sexual consent in online fanfiction: amateur-produced fiction based on existing media, such as TV shows, movies or books. I am using a range of methods to study the fanfiction community and its cultural output. Here some thoughts on the ethical questions I have come up against while designing and conducting my research.

A brief introduction to the fanfiction community:

Modern fanfiction originated in paper zines, but these days the vast majority of the community (or communities, really) live and communicate online, in spaces that are on the cusp of the private-public boundary. Fanfiction, and the communities that produce it, are a Google search away - if you know about them.

The fanfiction community consists predominantly of women and non-binary people, a majority of whom identify as members of a sexual, gender or romantic minority (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, asexual, aromantic, etc.). Statistically, a significant proportion of community members are survivors of sexual or gender-based violence. (In the UK, 45% of women have experienced rape, sexual assault, domestic abuse or stalking. It is reasonable to assume that this is reflected in the make-up of the fanfiction community.) These demographics are reflected in the kinds of stories the community produces: stories which focus on (often queer) sexual and romantic relationships, sexually explicit stories, stories which explore issues of sexual consent extensively and in profoundly nuanced ways - which is the focus of my research.

In many ways, the fanfiction community is vulnerable, though not necessarily in a way you would find as a tickbox on an ethics form. The social stigma attached to marginalised sexualities (including women’s and queer sexualities) means that there are potentially significant social and economic consequences associated with being identified as a reader or writer of erotic fanfiction. Additionally, fanfiction is generally based on copyrighted material (or sometimes real people such as actors, musicians and other celebrities), and there are also legal risks involved in producing and circulating it. Members of the community therefore have developed a range of approaches and tactics to managing their online identities and involvement in fanfiction separately from other online activities. They participate predominantly pseudonymously or anonymously in activities around fanfiction and are often, rightly, wary of outside scrutiny, whether it be by journalists or academics. Having said that, this is also a community with a very strong identity, strong traditions of mutual support, and very much in the habit of theorising itself.

Social Media and the Digital Data Set:

Some of what I study is the fanfiction itself, which is published on authors’ personal blogs and websites, on social media platforms like LiveJournal and Tumblr, and in fanfiction archives such as fanfiction.net (FFN) and the Archive of Our Own (AO3). But I also study fan interactions and fan practices in these semi-public social media spaces. My data set therefore includes podcasts, comments left on fanfiction stories, conversations between community members posted on social media sites, and “meta” (commentary and analysis) which community members produce on topics ranging from the quality of writing in a TV series to in-depth examinations of social and political issues as represented in media and fanfiction. Because I have been a member of the community for nearly two decades, in many cases I also get privileged access to material which isn’t posted publicly, for instance locked LiveJournal posts or AO3 stories.

Things that keep me awake at night:

Below are three case studies of things gone wrong in fandom or online research, and the questions they raise for me.

Theory of Fic Gate: This was an incident in early 2015 where a class of undergraduate students were asked to leave comments on fanfiction as part of their assessment. They had little to no knowledge of the community, their standards, the rules of engagement. They were in fact specifically encouraged to leave a “critical” comment on the stories, something around which there are a lot of social rules within the fanfiction community. These comments caused a lot of upset to individuals whose writing was on the course reading list, as well as a lot of outrage within the fanfiction community who felt disrespected, and some ill will towards researchers and academia. The community organised quickly around one of the writers whose work was on the course reading list and engaged in more or less constructive debate with the course leaders and some of the students.

The incident raises some key questions for online and fandom researchers in general and for my research in particular. Who am I doing this research for? Who am I accountable to? As someone who is both a member of the fanfiction community and an outsider, how do I negotiate these two positions in a way that is respectful to the community, ethical, and still allows me to conduct my research with both quality and integrity?

At least part of the answer for me personally is that I feel accountable to the fanfiction community. I have a responsibility to them to treat them fairly and with respect. It is absolutely vital for me to be deeply familiar with the community and culture, their views and practices, their understanding of themselves and the world, before I engage them directly. This knowledge helps me engage the community respectfully, ask the right ethical questions, and make decisions about what material I expose to wider academic and public scrutiny. I am also working on ways to give the fanfiction community ways to feed back to me and have some control over the research, through my research blog, through interactions with interviewees, and through attending fandom conventions and speaking about my research.

Dalek half balls: “From Dalek half balls to Daft Punk helmets: Mimetic fandom and the crafting of replicas” is a published academic paper by a highly respected fan studies scholar and it makes some interesting points. It also cites and argues directly against theory written by a member of the fanfiction community, published on their LiveJournal. The paper addresses this LiveJournal post as if the two are on a level playing field with each other, ignoring power differentials. As with any other research, it is important to remember that there are power differentials between researchers and the people we study. Just because we can both stick up a blog on the internet and comment on each other’s posts doesn’t make us equal.

On the other hand, I am also increasingly coming to realise that on the subject I am studying - sexual consent - the fanfiction community produces distinct, extensive and nuanced knowledges not available in other communities or even in feminist academia. These knowledges are not in a format that academia would necessarily recognise, and there is considerable potential value in finding ways to disseminate them beyond their current context (though there are also risks involved in this). This raises huge questions about the role of the researcher in this space, and about the researcher’s relationship with the material and the community producing it. A lot of this material is theoretically rich and robust despite its unconventional (for academia) format. It feels wrong to simply treat it as “data”, to take it and put my own stamp on it. On the other hand, I believe it would also be wrong to treat this material and its authors as equal to theory and analysis published in a peer-reviewed journal and engage with it on that level, as that would hold it up to impossible standards.

Key questions for me to consider here: How do my choices of research subject and methodology reproduce or challenge power relations? How can I tweak those choices towards challenging and away from reproducing?

The Facebook Happiness Experiment: In June 2014, it was revealed that Facebook had manipulated users’ newsfeeds with the intention of manipulating their mood. While in my research I am not directly manipulating anyone or anything, I am in many cases conducting something that walks the fine line between covert and participant observation.

This raises some interesting questions. How much of the internet/social media platforms can be legitimately regarded as a public space? What are people’s expectations of privacy, how are they constructed and how are they managed? One common practice in the fanfiction community is privacy through obscurity: those in the know can find us, but most of the world has no idea. With increasing exposure of fanfiction in mainstream media, this expectation is becoming unrealistic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that community behaviour and practices are always changing in line with these developments.

What is my responsibility as a researcher in terms of meeting those privacy expectations, and what are the practicalities around that? A significant issue for me will be quoting fan conversations and “meta” verbatim when a simple Google search can lead others back to the original source.

These are some of the questions that keep me awake at night. Perhaps the biggest insight for me here is that the vast majority of them are not asked on an ethics application form. While going through the ethics approval process has been a useful starting point for me, I have had to put in a lot of thought outside of and beyond the framework of that single form. There certainly aren’t any universal right answers for these questions, and some days I am not even convinced there is a single right answer for my particular research. There are simply different choices I can make, with as much consultation with the community as possible, while being aware of the power imbalances and responsibilities inherent in my position.

Getting to ‘Yes’ in the digital age

Last Monday (11^th May) the SRA, along with NSMNSS, hosted a seminar looking at ethics and informed consent in the context of online research. As long-standing network members will know, the ethical challenges of conducting research has been something that has consistently cropped up as a core concern for social scientists looking to use social media in their research, and this event demonstrated that this continued to be the case.

Matt Williams from the Social Data Science Lab kicked off proceedings with a discussion of his experiences of ethics in social media research based on his work with COSMOS, a platform for accessing Twitter data.

Matt focussed on some of the issues relating to publishing research based on Twitter data, and how Twitter’s policies relating to the publication of Tweets (showing names, @usernames, and unmodified Tweet text) can clash with researchers requirements of anonymity and protecting participants from harm, before outlining their approach to ‘risk assessment’ before publishing Tweets.

He also introduced some survey research suggesting that social media users were split in how concerned they were about their data being used for research, and that some types of users were more likely to be concerned than others. However, participants seemed to be less concerned about their data being used by universities than government or commercial organisations.

Following Matt (and some role playing!), Janet Salmons talked through some of her experiences of the best way of getting informed participation from potential research respondents in an online environment.

Janet emphasised the importance of building trust and credibility with research participants, and that different types of online communication actually provide opportunities to engage and inform participants; the key is thinking about who your target population is.

For those who missed out, or went and didn’t get everything down at the time, you can find copies Matt and Janet’s slides here and here, and Janet has also provided some additional resources about ethics and online research here.

As is often the case, perhaps the most interesting session was the Q&A at the end, chaired by NatCen’s Kandy Woodfield. The panel & audience discussed a range of questions covering topics such as the difficulties (and ethics) involved in removing participants once analysis has started (or been published!), whether consent can ever be truly ‘informed’, and whether participants need to be reminded of consent for passive (ongoing) observation.

Unfortunately (although perhaps not unexpectedly), there was not enough time to answer all of the attendees’ questions, so NSMNSS are going to be hosting a follow-up #NSMNSS Tweetchat on the ethics of online research on Monday 1^st June at 5pm (UK time).

If you have any questions that you would like to put to the NSMNSS community, please message us @NSMNSS, email us at nsmnss@natcen.ac.uk, or simply leave a comment below!

Back to University: Summary of ‘Research Ethics into the Digital Age’ Conference

Kelsey Beninger is a researcher at NatCen Social Research.

Recently I was invited to speak at Sheffield University’s ‘Research Ethics into the Digital Age’ Conference. It was an exciting opportunity, not in the least because it involved a swanky pre-conference speaker’s dinner. But really, it was exciting because the University was celebrating ten years of its research ethics committee and was launching their new purpose-built online ethics submission portal. Paper-based applications, be gone!

Usually at these type of ethics and internet mediated research events there are a diverse bunch of cross discipline and cross institution technicians, practitioners, ethical specialists, to name a few. This event had a diverse audience but in a different way; they were mostly from Sheffield University. The great turnout demonstrated how there was not only commitment to high ethical standards, but actual interest from across departments and job roles at the University. I met a few administrators that manage the huge numbers of ethics applications, members of the university research ethics committee, and students and professors galore!

The morning had a great line up of key note speakers. Professor Richard Jenkins from Sheffield University provided a nice overview of ethics in international projects around three themes:

1. data must satisfy the host country’s legal and ethical requirements,
2. data must satisfy your university’s REC policy, and
3. data must satisfy the professional standards of the profession you are associated with.

Some obvious but important key points included knowing the specific cultural, legal and social laws of the country you are going to research in before you get there and keep a detailed paper trail of everything you do. Also, you share risks with any collaborators so if they don’t have governance framework in their country then discuss it early and encourage the application of your UK standards. The moral of the story: the ethical situation is more complex with international research but the responsibilities you have as a researcher with respect to ethics are the same.

Professor Joe Cannataci from the University of Malta cut the legal jargon and conveyed important points about data protection and the use of personal data from the internet. He drew on an intriguing array of international projects (one of which may have involved a funny story of him dancing his entrance to gain acceptance when meeting a rural tribe in Malaysia). He started his presentation by discussing the principle of relevance in data protection law. This is something many of us in research are familiar with- collect only the right data, collected only by the right people, at the right time and used by the right people in the right way for an agreed time. Say that 10 times fast! Of particular relevance to researchers beginning studies across Europe is knowing where the data is to be stored because there are different data protection laws in European countries compared to EU countries.

Next up was Claire Hewson from the Open University. Claire provided an overview of the challenges associated with the ethics of internet mediated research. A point that got me thinking ‘Is there truly an ‘unobtrusive’ type of data collection?’ was her distinction between obtrusive and unobtrusive methods. Obtrusive are activities such as actively recruiting individuals and those individuals knowingly partake in research. Unobtrusive methods included big data, data mining, and observations. It’s only unobtrusive because people are not aware of it in the first instance. It would become pretty obtrusive to some if participants were cognisant of what was being done with their personal data. A nice take away point from the presentation was that ‘thinking is not optional’ when it comes to applying ethical frameworks to changing online environments.

After a tasty lunch in Sheffield University’s lovely new student union building my turn was up! I delivered a session on the challenges of social media research, drawing upon recent exploratory research with users of social media (http://www.natcen.ac.uk/our-research/research/research-using-social-media-users-views/) about their views on researchers using their data in their work. I also drew on the work of the network and the survey conducted by network member Janet Salmons on researcher and practitioner views of the ethics of online research. My group explored the challenges associated with three themes: recruitment and data collection; interviewer identity and wellbeing; and analysis and presentation of data. Summarising key points that we as researchers are familiar with, I pushed the issues home by using direct examples from our exploratory research.

We wrapped up with a section on recommendations including only using social media in research if it is appropriate for your question; being transparent with participants and other researchers about risks of the research and the limitations of your sample; taking reasonable steps to inform users of your intention to utilise their data in research. Read the full list of recommendations in the report, here.

Social Media – Giving sport stars a voice?

Abdullah Anees is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster.

Two things I am very fond of are social media and sports, and what better way to relate the two in modern day then a reflective blog on how one influences the other.

As we all know, social media platforms have allowed people to voice their opinions with others worldwide. The difference in a message being shared from any individual to the larger audience has developed at a furious pace since the development of Web 2.0. We now see people, such as athletic celebrities, who we were once accustomed to only seeing on the TV, now becoming vocal on social media platforms. It seems stars are taking their views more public rather than leaving that up to their publicists.

Twitter, Facebook and various other social media platforms have allowed athletes to more readily reach out to their fans to establish a common connection. This common connection is the will to express their opinions and views; they now have a stage to show they have another side to them apart from sports. TV and Newspapers did not really give them a stage to express views on certain issues; and many times they were miss-represented without having a way to reply.

If newspapers and television pick and choose information from these athletes then surely social media allows us to eliminate the press and obtain information directly from these stars? Social media has given people access to direct sources of information in every possible field.

Social media has given the space for these public stars needed to protect their image in times where a candid photograph or a quote could be exploited and taken out of context.

Does a social medium really give them freedom of speech?

Many sport stars have gone on to twitter to express their views on certain events and have received mixed reactions from the online community. This has resulted in them retracting statements made online by deleting posts and tweets. Being in the ‘public eye’ they are expected to behave in an appropriate manner, questioning their actual freedom of opinions.

Being role models of many young children globally, their views and behaviours are constantly monitored on social platforms and you get the feeling the press is ready to pounce on any slip up these stars make. The press will always build stories around sports stars expressing their views and opinions socially.

Another angle I want to mention is the commercial aspect of sport stars being on social media. If a top flight footballer tweets a picture of his branded boots is that a message from his sponsors? Do they really have total control over their tweets? Even in the case of false advertisements from companies who deny they get sponsored athletes to promote to their audience their brand it still has to be questioned.

There are some sports stars that I would love to see on social platforms; however there are numerous reasons why they keep away. Their inability to cope with the ‘digital public eye’ and what they might feel are restrictions of speech being a public figure would be my first opinion.

Would you like to reflect on your research, pose ethical or logistical research questions to the network, or blog about developments in the field of new social media? See your name in print by emailing nsmnss@natcen.ac.uk 

New Social Media, New Social Science… and New Ethical Issues!

We held a small event on Friday 21st February 2014, our goal was to have a series of focused discussions around the ethical dimensions of social media research and to come up with a series of action points for the network to take forward. The day also included two presentations of related research by network members. You can read a a storify of the day - sfy.co/rPSZ 

We will post more about the outcomes and discussions shortly but we want to kick off by sharing links to the two reports and presentations. A team from NatCen has been researching the views of social media users on how their posted data should be handled by researchers. The findings are illuminating and will help to inform how we consider we should work with social media data in the future. You can read a post by the research team here, and then the findings here.

Now Janet Salmons introduces the research she has undertaken on what researchers need to help support their ethical practice when conducting social research online:

Our NSMNSS network has convened researchers from the UK and around the world in thought-provoking dialogue on topics related to scholarly use the Internet and social media. Recurrent matters related to research ethics demonstrate that there are many questions and concerns about how to adapt conventional guidelines to kinds of online research. In the atmosphere of collaboration and exchange NSMNSS encourages, resources are often suggested.  My curiosity led to two questions: to what extent do the resources suggested by the NSMNSS network address the concerns and questions raised by the NSMNSS network? What are the gaps and how can or should they be addressed? The report, “New Social Media, New Social Science… and New Ethical Issues!” is the result of this exploration. 

Numerous concerns and queries emerged from network discussions, classified here as seven interrelated themes:

• Participants: Issues related to online sampling and recruiting to find, screen, and select appropriate and verifiable research participants.

• Identity: Issues related to the identity, anonymity and/or privacy of the participant andthe researcher.

• Research site: Issues related to the setting for the study or source of data.

• Informed consent: Issues related to the determination of when consent is needed and what type of consent is adequate.

• Data: Issues related to user-generated content and ownership and protection of data.

• Research guidance: Issues related to the academic institutions and committees that prepare the next generation of researchers and must approve researchers’ proposals or decide whether their research is adequate for tenure or promotion.

• Methods and methodologies: Issues related to implications of social media research for the ways we think about research methods and methodologies.

The first five themes relate specifically to the designing, conducting and reporting on research. The final two themes raise larger issues for the field—a field NSMNSS members characterize as multidisciplinary.

Many of the recommended guidelines and materials offered little or no advice about online research ethics. However, a few professional societies and organizations have made the effort to either create a set of guidelines specific to research on the Internet, or have created supplementary materials that focus on how to apply that profession’s ethical standards when conducting studies online—and reporting on the findings. Examples of the latter were chosen for this review including materials from the Association of Internet Researchers(AOIR), British Educational Research Association (BERA), British Psychological Society (BPS), CASRO, European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR) and Market Research Society (MRS), and Association (MRA).

As you can see, in some cases the profiled guidelines make recommendations aligned with NMSNSS network needs and in other cases they instead identify other risks and concerns.

You can read the full report here or watch the presentation below.

Please use the comment box to add your thoughts, relevant experiences, or to suggest other resources. We are also planning a Tweetchat discussion of the report on Tuesday 11th March at 7pm GMT (8am NZDT/6am AEDT/8pm CET/9pm SAST/3pm EDT/1pm MDT), so please join us ! You can read more about taking part in an NSMNSS twitter chat here.

Blurring the limits between personal and professional life

María Belén Conti is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster.

As a journalist, I usually find myself in a difficult situation when it comes to social media: would it affect my job opportunities if I openly express my opinion of certain topics online as my friends do? Should I always be professional because if anything personal is filtered I will lose my credibility (major asset for a journalist)?

Some may say that the best solution is to have two different profiles, one for personal and other professional proposes (EFE, 2011; Restrepo, 2012). But again, the personal profile is there and the chance of information, opinions or photos filtering to audiences we don’t want to reach is still high.

“You have one identity...The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly... Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”, said Mark Zuckerberg (quoted in Meikle and Young, 2012, p.129). But is that really the case?

As Erving Goffman (1959) points out in his book The presentation of self in everyday life, we are always performing different roles to different audiences: “When an individual appears in front of others, he knowingly and unwillingly projects a definition of situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part” (p.234-235).

In other words, we won’t show the same persona in our work, in front of our family or with our friends. And that doesn’t make us lose our integrity, even if Zuckerberg doesn’t agree. Those different audiences have different expectations of us, and therefore we will highlight those aspects that better fit the “front” we want to show in each performance.

But, what happens when social and networked media mix those audiences? What if they get access to the back stage that we want to keep private? After all, as Goffman points out, usually we relax when we know we are not being watched. However, with the increased visibility online, those chances are reduced. As Meikle and Young (2012) explain, “convergent media make the invisible visible” (p.129). So that brings me back to the beginning of this post: how does that affect our lives? Are the limits between professional and personal life blurred?

To address this issue, the concept of Foucault’s Panopticon is useful. It implies that the permanent visibility make us modify our behaviour, being more cautious than what we would be if not being watched (Thompson, 1995; Meikle and Young, 2012). I find it interesting that a study among long-distance students (Bregman and Haythornthwaite, 2003) -whose assignments include regular blogposts - confirm that we pay more attention to what we say and how we say it when we know we are being observed and that our contributions may be searched later:

“Every opinion, however well expressed, every joke, turn of phrase, and typographical error remains preserved, leaving a written legacy of an individual’s persona and style” (p.124-125).

The same can be said about photos, videos and opinions we publish online. If something is on the Internet, you cannot be sure it won’t be filtered. Even if we have good management of our privacy settings, our friends may comment or share that post and they may have different privacy settings than ours. So if we don’t want to risk something becoming publically available perhaps we better not publish it anywhere on the Internet.

References:

Bregman, A. and Haythornthwaite, C.(2003). Radicals of presentation: visibility, relation, and co-presence in persistent conversation. New Media & Society, 5 (1), 117-140. [online] Available from: Sage Publications. < http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90.6651&rep=rep1&type=pdf> [Accessed 30 November 2013]

EFE News Agency. (2011). Guía para empleados de EFE en redes sociales (Guide for EFE’s employees in social media). [online] Available from: <http://www.efe.com/FicherosDocumentosEFE/Gu%C3%ADaEFE-Redes.pdf> [Accessed 1 December 2013]

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Meikle, G. and Young, S. (2012). Media convergence: networked and digital media in everyday life, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Restrepo, H (2012). Borrador manual de estilo en redes sociales (Draft style guidelines for social media). [online] Available from: <http://es.scribd.com/doc/113601191/Borrador-Manual-de-Estilo-en-Redes-Sociales-Hernan-Restrepo> [Accessed 30 November 2013]

Thompson, J. (1995). The media and modernity: a social theory of the media, Cambridge: Polity Press

Reflections on the influence of social media on privacy

Akin Olaniyan is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster. 

Making sense of the obvious tension between online visibility and privacy is never going to be a straightforward thing for me. Having worked as a reporter and a corporate communication specialist for more than two decades, I have some sense of dealing with public scrutiny of my work. Until now, social media was just for me another platform. If you know newspapers, I used to think, you shouldn’t have problems functioning in the new environment that digital convergence has created.

Or so I thought.

Just weeks after arriving for the Social Media MA at Westminster University, I have come to agree with danah boyd that being visible through social media can both complicate and enrich our lives (boyd, 2012). Social media networking sites like Facebook and Twitter offer new ways of engagement that have collapsed the walls of privacy, sometimes with terrible consequences. Henry Jenkins captures this well when he says, ‘when people take media into their own hands, the results can be wonderfully creative; they can also be bad news for all involved.’ For me, herein lies the irony; the thought that we would be willing to trade off a slice of our privacy for a chance to make ourselves ‘visible.’

The culture of sharing that is one of the tenets of the convergent media environment may be fraught with minefields, but Castells’ point, that, ‘In our society, the protocols of communication are not based on a sharing of culture but on the culture of sharing’ (Castells, 2009) is useful here. The new environment has given us ‘power’ to determine what we create, remix, share, anytime we want and with those we choose.

True, in the social media environment, ‘the media are no longer what just what we watch, listen to or read – the media are now what we do’ (Meikle and Young, 2012). Oh! How we enjoy the newfound freedom, to do away with the middleman and reach out in our network. Never mind that I performed a similar role in a newspaper. Maybe it sounds out of place to ask whether social media serves a critical need. The status updates, the likes and the sometimes, meaningless chatter all serve a need. They bind us together. “Our playful conventions and in-jokes may create insider symbols that help groups to cohere’ as Baym (2010) notes very well.

Notwithstanding, it looks to me like Rosen’s description of the people formerly known as the audience is rather too ‘romantic’. For one, corporate media may no longer ‘own the eyeballs’ as he states but in this process of becoming more active, we lose something important as well. Given what I have leant in just a few weeks, boyd’s argument that, ‘when people assume you share everything, they don’t ask about what you don’t share’ (boyd, 2012), for me, sounds frightening even in the era of ‘Big Brother’. We all have a way of ignoring ‘Big Brother’ until we’re caught in uncompromising positions.

My mind went to Boyd’s position the story of the UK university students whose Facebook profiles were swiped by ratemash.com and published without permission, in the latest example of third party misuse of online data. The all pervasive power of both Facebook and Twitter, to be able to remove whatever exists of the thin line between the private and the public has got me taking a second look at my accounts on social media platforms.

My goal? Cut out all but the most important of my engagements online. Every text, every image and ever engagement is an opportunity to say something and connect. As Baym (2010) says, “…as people appropriate the possibilities of textual media to convey social cues, create immediacy, entertain, and show off for one another, they build for themselves, build interpersonal relationships, and create social concepts….” 

I realize as I do this though, that there’s a chance that I may miss out in other ways but the thought that my profile and other data can be taken, remixed and shared sounds worrying.

Maybe I’m old fashioned but I strongly think there’s a creepy feeling to having a text, say, an unflattering selfie made available on the scale that convergent media makes possible. But having seen the reaction of some of the students whose profiles were swiped by ratemash.com, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t be embarrassed unless they were in showbiz.

References:

boyd, d. (2012): Participating in the always-on lifestyle. In: Mandiberg, M (ed.) The social media reader. New York/London: New York University Press, Pp 71-76

Jenkins, H. (2008): Convergence culture: Where old media and new media collide. New York/London: New York University Press

Castells, M. (2009): Communication power. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Meikle, G. and Young, S. (2012): Media convergence: Networked Digital media in everyday life. London: Palgrave

Baym, K. N. (2010): Personal connections in the digital age. Cambridge: Polity

Rosen, Jay: The people formerly known as the audience. In: Mandiberg, M (ed.) The social media reader. New York/London: New York University Press, pp. 13-16

'Tis the season...of Social Media Conferences

It's that season!

No, I don’t mean bathing suit season or in my case sunburn season. It is a time of many exciting conferences on the use, opportunities and challenges of using social media in research. NSMNSS co-ordinators have been doing their best to cover as many of these as possible and we’re finding that research and practitioners across disciplines are having the same conversations about ethics and quality in social media research.

Firstly, the  Social Research Association (SRA) hosted their third conference on social media, attracting over 80 delegates. The diversity in approaches to and views of social media in research made it clear these platforms provide a great opportunity to breakdown communication barriers between disciplines, fields and sectors. Technicians, programmers, social workers, civil servants, academics, market and applied researchers were all accounted for and kept up animated discussions throughout the day.

Some sessions that stood out for me included a case study about using social media to investigate young people’s drug use. Claire Meehan candidly explained that social media wasn’t part of the initial research design; young people brought it up so much that her study evolved to accommodate this emerging finding in its subsequent data collection. This sparked many questions around consent with young people. Indeed, the theme of ethics was a thread weaving throughout the day’s sessions (and tea breaks!)

Another was the session from social worker Jenny Simpson. Applying a socio-psychological approach to adopted and foster children using social media, she suggested children are simply testing societal boundaries the same way children have forever, just in a different environment. It raised many thoughts about assumed perceptions of vulnerability, contested power roles, and the changing world of social work.  

How could I talk about the conference with plugging my own team’s presentation? At NatCen a team of research trainees have developed and delivered qualitative research exploring perceptions of the public on the ethics of social media research. We presented on our emerging themes, among which included participants’ considerable scepticism about the credibility of research using social media. As researchers we accept the rich potential of social media but we have forgotten to explain its rationale and potential benefits to the very people whose data we are using- the users!

Similarly diverse attendees were discussing related issues at the AHRC-funded Social Media Knowledge Exchange (SMKE) conference, with historians, librarians and archivist, information specialists and others from the digital humanities all contributing to the discussions. My colleague Gareth Morrell spoke about our research on ethics at this conference and the striking thing was that researchers and practitioners in other disciplines are facing the same challenges. In a session on ethics, there’s clearly an appetite for us all to think ethically – or as Anne Alexander from the Digital Humanities Network described, use our ethical conscience – and not just rely on ethical guidelines. After all, our research shows that we can’t assume anything in relation to how users feel about us using their data.

More fieldwork to come on this project and more refined findings to be presented at Westminster Uni’s Social Media Conference in Sept. Save the date!

How private is Facebook?

This post was written by Kelsey Beninger of NatCen Social Research and was first published on the organisation's blog.


Social media is constantly evolving. It’s not surprising that even the most diligent social networkers struggle to keep abreast of how changes affect the information they share. This is particularly true of Facebook. I’ve heard colleagues and friends say, ‘at least what you write on Facebook is private - only your friends can see it.’

A Northern Irish High Court disagrees.

In a recent case, the court allowed a document posted to the defendant’s Facebook account to be included as evidence despite demands by the defendant that it was confidential information. Information posted, even if meant only for friends and in a closed group, was considered to be done in full knowledge that those friends could forward the information at which point it enters the public domain. From here the principle of confidentiality has no application.

While this new case law is not legally binding in England it is quite persuasive. It raises a whole slew of ethical and methodological concerns already flagged in the field of social media research.

Social media represents an untapped wealth of opportunity for social researchers. But there’s a lack of understanding of privacy principles and confidentiality, which undermines informed consent. Academics and practitioners are hot on the trail of these debates, like the work of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) and the Cardiff Online Social Media Observatory (COSMOS), and our own network of methodological and cross-discipline innovation, New Social Media, New Social Science.

Often what’s missing from this conversation is the views of users. How do they curate their digital lives? What do they understand about how their information is used and shared on the internet? What do they think about their information being used in social media research?

To better understand this, we’re launching an in depth study next month exploring what the public think about the use of their information from social media platforms for research. We will use the findings to help inform principles of best practice for researchers to make sure they act responsibly and in line with the views of the public when conducting online research.

Until then, think twice about how you use your social media accounts.

One small step for social networkers, one giant leap for social researchers…but what the ethics it all about?

Being involved in the NSMNSS network, you’ll all realise how social media opens doors for researchers. With a huge number of people expressing their views and opinions about everything from tweeting Cardinals for the election of the Pope to expanding the classroom through social media, we have instant access into some part of individuals’ thoughts, feelings and attitudes.

We also know, however, that this raises a number of questions about issues surrounding privacy, anonymity and confidentiality. We are seeing an increased need for Twitter users to understand media law, as covered by BBC News last month.  Let’s take anonymity for instance: search engines make it easy to link data collected from social media to identifiable individuals.  Informed consent is a real grey area: researchers may use open access areas of platforms such as twitter to collect data but are the users aware of this? Would they be happy for their information to be used for research?   

Consent with specific groups can be even more difficult. With children and young people becoming increasingly tech savvy, able to use sites that might not be age appropriate how can researchers know a participant is really the age they say they are? The ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) ethical guidelines (2012) explain that researchers should seek consent from a parent/carer if the research involves vulnerable groups such as children. But how would this work online when an identity can be made up? Wales is advising youngsters on such issues, in a pilot scheme for pupils aiming to protect their personal information and how to stay safe on social media platforms.

With technology constantly evolving the ethical principles for researchers becomes blurry. Researchers have an obligation to act ethically when carrying out research but in the online world formal guidelines are unclear and often unable to keep up with constant advancements of the internet. Researchers can use the current guidelines and regulations to guide them on such issues, but the views of the general public are missed out which is an important piece to the puzzle.

This is where our research comes in. As part of NatCen’s Graduate Trainee Research Programme, a group of us are leading a study looking at online ethics from the public’s perspective. We want to investigate how users of Facebook and twitter understand their online presence and their digital footprint; we want to look whether people are aware of how their information might be used; and we want to gain insight to their views and opinions of their rights online.

We hope that this research will assist the development of ethical guidelines for online research and start to provide some primary evidence in relation to the importance people attach to some of the ethical concerns that are being raised. This is a crucial part of not only ethical, but also high quality practise in the world of online research.                               

Knowledge Exchange Seminar 3

The third Knowledge Exchange Seminar of the New Social Media, New Social Science (NSMNSS) network was held on the 28th of January. The topic for this event was 'Qualitative Research and Social Media' and it brought together specialist speakers to discuss a range of topics, including opportunities and challenges of 'Deep Data', understanding behaviors and networks through the lens of netnography, and the changing role of the qualitative researcher online. We asked a range of contributors to share case studies illustrating their experiences of using qualitative methods in social media research and these were really useful starting points for highlighting the challenges today’s researchers face.

Our first speaker of the day was Janet Salmons, from the Capella University School of Business and Technology, on the opportunities and challenges of ‘Deep Data’. In an era where increasing focus is laid on social media’s potential to provide quantitative researchers with ‘big data’, Janet argues that the challenge for qualitative researchers is still to see data in context and to make meaning from this. Data collection online often blurs the lines between methods such as online interviews, observations and documentary analysis, and this has practical and ethical implications for researchers. Ethics was the topic of our first knowledge exchange seminar and has probably been the strongest thread running through the whole of the network’s activities so far. You can read more about some of the issues raised in previous discussions here: http://www.methodspace.com/group/nsmnss/forum/topics/nsmnss-workshop-3-ethics

A reoccurring question in the discussion following Janet’s presentation was ‘how new and different are the issues and challenges facing social media researchers from those which qualitative (and quantitative researchers) have always faced?’ Informed consent, for example, is not new and revisiting the parameters of informed consent throughout the course of your research is just as important if you’re doing research online or offline. Some of the new challenges lie in questions around the non-neutrality of social media platforms and the increasingly ‘connected’ nature of our digital selves. With just a few clicks, you may be able to access someone’s profile on Facebook which might link you to their LinkedIn profile, which may in turn take you to their Twitter feed. Whether this data is considered public or private is only one of the questions – often we are able to find out more about a person than we’d imagined when using online data sources. For example, harvesting tweets can also tell you what kind of phone someone is tweeting from! We have to keep remembering that these platforms have been set up for a commercial purpose and are collecting data which is valuable for commercial interests- very little is actually known about what users of these platforms think about how this data is used in social research.

The second presentation of the day came from Gachoucha Kretz, from the ISC PARIS School of Management, on netnography and understanding behaviour and networks. Netnography is a method developed by Robert V Kozinets (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book233748) and it provides a framework for studying cultures and communities online. Some of the issues Gachoucha raised were around the challenges of identifying your sample online – she talked about her PhD work on fashion blogs and the difficulty of identifying which blogs were worth studying. You either need to do a search using Google’s ranking and trust an algorithm, or rely on a list of blogs someone else thinks is influential. Other challenges you face when studying online communities is the overwhelming archive of material, the multi –media nature of online data, and the offline relationships and networks which influence the online space but may not be visible online.

Kandy Woodfield of NatCen kicked off the final session on the changing role of the qualitative researcher online. Many of the issues raised in the previous sessions around ethics came up again and there was a strong sense that researchers of today need some new literacies to effectively research in online spaces. For example, how deep does your knowledge of debates around whether distinctions between online and offline are passé need to be? Richard Rogers calls it ‘the end of the virtual’, but you could spend a lifetime just reading about this before embarking on your own online research! What about our knowledge of each individual platform we might study – do you need to be on Twitter to study Twitter? And what new skills are required if we are to take into account multi-media data, given that most online platforms involve words, pictures, video and sound? One of the benefits of online research is the ability it gives us to research globally without physically travelling to each location, but what do researchers need to know about cultural codes of conduct and the varying uses of platforms by different populations?

There were probably more questions raised than answered, but it was a great chance to discuss common challenges and to try to determine ways forward. The network is currently working considering ways to develop and influence ethical guidelines for social media research – we’ll be in touch about this in more detail soon. Please join the conversation, share ideas and potential solutions through the network’s methodspace group (http://www.methodspace.com/profile/NSMNSS). You can also visit the NSMNSS Blog (http://nsmnss.blogspot.co.uk/) to read the latest discussions on social media in the social sciences and to view past videos.

Calling all participants! Recruitment through LinkedIn

Wilma Garvin is currently undertaking research into organisation development and the role of women in business in the 21st century and lectures at the Docklands Business School, University of East London. 

My research was to review approaches to organization development in multinationals and government departments in order to create specific case studies. The method used was to undertake face to face and telephone interviews. Sampling using probability sampling seemed a logical approach since the objective was to interview Heads of Organisation Development (OD) or similar i.e. senior people responsible for Organisation Development.

Linkedin was used as the social media. I use Linkedin on a regular basis and I am a member of several OD networks. It seemed like the ideal way to identify and make contact with potential participants. Therefore, the opportunity was already being in OD networks and having contacts either in OD or with contacts in their networks in OD. The challenge was using these in order to find potential participants. These methods of making contact with people through Linkedin were as follows:

- Posting a message with some details of the research in the group area and asking people to contact me

- Asking direct contacts to make an introduce me to a specific person in their network

In using Linkedin, as one source of participants the challenges were:

Ethics: while people voluntarily post their business details on Linkedin, it did seem as if it might be seen as a low level form of stalking by using Linkedin to search for potential participants. Waskul and Douglas (1996 p131) have identified online interaction as neither public or private but as the ‘privately public’ and the ‘publicly private’.

Another challenge was the expectation that there would be a positive response from each of the people in my network to introducing me to their contacts. Some contacts took action immediately even though the contact was on a 3rd level. In a few instances, my contact did not respond and took no action. Where people did try to introduce me to their contacts, the contact declined to participate.

Sampling: Using Linkedin for the sampling frame might be seen as valid although only those who have been a conscious decision to be on Linkedin will be found. This means that the list will be incomplete as it will not represent the whole community of OD specialists.

Linkedin is a public environment and so the people there have chosen to present certain information publicly and so this overcomes some of the ethical issues. It was only being used as a way to contact experts in the field and therefore there would be informed consent. The message posted on the discussion boards provided enough detail and then further details were provided as follow up and in advance of the interviews. However, posting a message on the discussion boards might have been seen as an inappropriate use of the community (Eysenbach and Till 2001).

With regard to ethics, there was also the personal feeling that looking at people’s profile before asking a contact to make an introduction seemed like invasion of privacy may be the change from the ‘old’ attitudes to the new public environment of the internet.

With regard to sampling, it seemed as if self- selection non-probability sampling had to be accepted. On the positive side, it might have been difficult to identify a database of OD specialists since the job titles of OD practitioners can be very different and so using Linkedin does provide a way to identify who these are by drawing on knowledge of the job titles used and the access to Linkedin groups.

The resources used were the knowledge of OD, contacts and specialist groups and the knowledge of using social media.

Linkedin and other social media platforms provide a way to make contact with professionals in specific categories who are willing to take place in research. While self-selection does take place, this can be seen as a positive aspect since the people who did volunteer were passionate about their subject area and were keen to share but also saw it as a way to learn from others.

References

Bakardjieva, M. and Feenberg, A (2001) Involving the virtual subject, Ethics Information Technology, Vol 2:4, p233-240

Eysenbach, G. and Till, J.E. (2001) Ethical issues in qualitative research on internet communities, British Medical Journal, Vol. 323, p1103-5

Waskul, D. and Douglass, M. (1996) Considering the electronic participant: some polemical observations on ethics of on-line research, The Information Society, Vol 12:2, p129-139

Knowledge Exchange Seminar 3: Programme

12.30pm	Arrival and lunch
1.00pm	Session 1
	Opportunities and challenges of ‘Deep Data’	■   Janet Salmons
1.50pm	Session 2
	Netnography: understanding behaviour and networks	■   Gachoucha Kretz
2.40pm	Break
3.00pm	Session 3
	The changing role of the qualitative researcher online	■   Kandy Woodfield & Dr Sarah Quinnell
3.50pm	Session 4
	Key messages for qualitative methods in relation to: ■  Opportunities and challenges of ‘deep data’ ■  Methodological challenges of netnography ■  Developing appropriate relationships and engagement with participants	■   Led by NSMNSS: break out groups to consider one each of the three sessions, plus where there are skills gaps, or further development projects needed.
4.30pm	Close and next steps