EDITORIAL
Ethical decision-making in Internet research: Another slant on the “Recursive Fury” debate Scholarly research is broadly guided by ethical principles to do no harm, to protect human and animal subjects, and to report findings honestly and completely. A recent controversy in scholarly publishing (commonly referred to as the “Recursive Fury” debate) raises issues of privacy, protection of human subjects, and libel laws. Briefly, the research by Lewandowsky, Cook, Oberauer, and Marriott (2013; retracted by the journal in 2014) reported a qualitative analysis of public social media postings and blogs that identified an association between climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists based on their postings (Anderson, April 9, 2014). The original paper is no longer available on the publisher’s website, so it is difficult to evaluate the original research; however, a Google search on “recursive fury” retrieved nearly 56,000 hits, most of which were about the paper and the debate. Normally, retractions of articles are done for research or publishing misconduct, but that does not appear to be the case here. Furthermore, retracted literature remains available with a link to the formal retraction, but in this case, the publisher removed the paper and the attendant commentary, leaving only the retraction notice. Many of the comments in the blogosphere and national media stated that the research was sound, the manuscript had been peer-reviewed, and the conclusions reached derived clearly from the analysis. A few bloggers had raised questions about ethical review of the study and whether or not the subjects were adequately protected from harm; however, most concluded that protection of human subjects was not an issue in this type of internet reserach. So, the scientific community was perplexed as to why the paper had been retracted. The publisher claimed in the retraction notice that “the legal context is insufficiently clear and therefore Frontiers [the publisher] wishes to retract the published article” (Lewandowsky et al., 2013, 2014). The notice made no claim of academic or ethical infraction. The notion of contextual issues spurred me to my next Google search: I searched for information on the context of research on public Internet postings, which yielded more than 20 million hits. It appears others have been thinking about this issue for a long time. Eysenback and Till (2001) concluded that although public Internet postings were a rich source of qualitative
Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners 26 (2014) 353–354
C 2014 American Association of Nurse Practitioners
material for health researchers, the publishing community was entering into the murky waters of new research ethics, particularly related to informed consent and privacy. A key issue is the context of Internet postings. Are the postings on public or private sites, and if private, how easy is it gain access to the site? Although participants in these online chat rooms or blog sites know they are commenting publicly, they may still believe that they are only commenting to legitimate members of their “community” (i.e., survivors of cancer, other people with mental illness, substance abusers, conspiracy theorists). Participants may resent researchers lurking in their “community” to mine participants’ comments for a scholarly analysis. Even if the researchers do not identify individuals in their manuscripts, any claim of protection of privacy by the researchers might be na¨ıve in this age of powerful search engines, particularly when blocks of text taken verbatim as examples and inserted into publications by the researchers can be used to find the original posting. The Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR: Markham & Buchanan, 2012) published a useful guide for conducting research using publicly available Internet postings. There are several issues of particular relevance to nurse researchers; these are also key questions in the debate over the “recursive fury” article. Protection of human subjects. It is undeniable that humans are somehow behind Internet postings, but in the context of research or institutional review boards (IRBs), originally created to protect human subjects in biomedical research, the concept of human subjects does not always fit with Internet research. Most of the Internet research I see in manuscripts submitted to JAANP has been declared exempt by IRBs; that is, the IRB does not see any need for full or even partial review of a research protocol involving “publicly available” content. This may work well for historical, social, or political, research, but if the context of the public commentary is not considered, individuals may be at risk. For example, a population of substance abusers in an online support group is far more vulnerable than a population of climate change deniers. Should there be special considerations for privacy protection or even a requirement for informed consent to use postings from the substance abusers? Protection of vulnerable populations at every point in the research
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process, even if it is not always clear exactly what the risk to an individual might be, is a key point in the AoIR guidelines. Expectations of privacy in the community. The context of the community contributes to individuals’ expectations of privacy. A private chat room carries greater expectations that no one who does not belong to the group, such as researchers, should be there. I have seen manuscripts where authors who belong to a private online community analyzed information that was shared within this context of an expectation of privacy. Even when an IRB has declared the research exempt, we will not publish such a paper in JAANP. In public spaces, the expectation of privacy may mean that exact quotations of participants, which could lead back directly to personal information about the person, should not be used. This is a problem for qualitative researchers who typically support their findings with specific quotes, which if modified for publication, may invalidate the researchers’ conclusions. Again, this is a situation that might not be solvable in an IRB application but should generate a thoughtful and objective analysis of ethical issues somewhere in the research process. Alternatively, as in the ‘recursive fury” debate, some have claimed the authors labeled individuals (as conspiracy theorists) in the public domain (Anderson, April 23, 2014), which created a violation of some expectation of privacy and possibly defamed some individuals. In my opinion, there is a big difference between being labeled a conspiracy theorist and being identified as a person with early-onset dementia. The method of research. If the research is intrusive, i.e., the researcher is actively involved in the community, or interviews participants, the community and each individual in it should be allowed to opt out and must be informed of any risks or benefits to participating. For example, if direct quotes are to be used, participants should be explicitly informed of this as well as the likelihood that quotes could be attributed to specific individuals (Eysenbach & Till, 2001). Potential hazards of participation in research are not always readily discernable to participants, and the hazard is often proportional to the vulnerability of the population. Researchers should also be aware that their known presence on a site might influence postings; this must be balanced with other ethical considerations. The benefit of the research should also be considered in relation to the potential harm. In some cases, the benefit will not outweigh the risks and even if
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all possible protections are observed, the manuscript may not pass peer review.
Take home messages for authors and researchers As a sociologist, I see the value of researching many aspects of our online lives. This is no different from researching how people make sense of their world and the actions of others around them; sociology, as an example, has a long history of ethnography, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and other similar methods to understand social interactions and institutions. Twitter, social media, YouTube, and blogs are impossible to ignore and provide a great resource for many people searching for answers to and support for complex psychosocial and medical situations. Ethical questions must be evaluated in light of a changing digital world. It is not safe to assume that all publicly available text is exempt from ethics oversight. When IRBs are not equipped to evaluate proposals for Internet research, the researchers themselves must lead the way. A good first step is to read the AoIR guidelines for Internet researchers (Markham & Buchanan, 2012) and join the dialogue of those interested in preserving a rational approach to these new technologies. The issues are complex now and will only become more complex as technology advances. We may not have seen the last of the “recursive furies.”
Charon A Pierson, PhD, GNP, FAAN, FAANP Editor-in-Chief
References Anderson, K. (April 9, 2014). Frontiers of Intimidation — What a Controversial Paper’s Travails Teach Us About Libel Laws and Publishing. Available at http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org Anderson, K. (April 23, 2014). Keeping it Real – Ethics and Privacy as the Frontiers “Recursive Fury” Case Continues to Churn. Available at http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org Eysenbach G., & Till, J. (2001). Ethical issues in qualitative research on internet communities. BMJ, 323, 1103–1105. Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Oberauer, K., & Marriott, M. (2013). Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 73. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073. Retracted by the publisher in Frontiers in Psychology, 27 March 2014 — doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00293 Markham, A., & Buchanan, E. (2012). Ethical decision-making and Internet research: Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0). Available at http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf
Ethical decision-making in Internet research: Another slant on the “Recursive Fury” debate Scholarly research is broadly guided by ethical principles to do no harm, to protect human and animal subjects, and to report findings honestly and completely. A recent controversy in scholarly publishing (commonly referred to as the “Recursive Fury” debate) raises issues of privacy, protection of human subjects, and libel laws. Briefly, the research by Lewandowsky, Cook, Oberauer, and Marriott (2013; retracted by the journal in 2014) reported a qualitative analysis of public social media postings and blogs that identified an association between climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists based on their postings (Anderson, April 9, 2014). The original paper is no longer available on the publisher’s website, so it is difficult to evaluate the original research; however, a Google search on “recursive fury” retrieved nearly 56,000 hits, most of which were about the paper and the debate. Normally, retractions of articles are done for research or publishing misconduct, but that does not appear to be the case here. Furthermore, retracted literature remains available with a link to the formal retraction, but in this case, the publisher removed the paper and the attendant commentary, leaving only the retraction notice. Many of the comments in the blogosphere and national media stated that the research was sound, the manuscript had been peer-reviewed, and the conclusions reached derived clearly from the analysis. A few bloggers had raised questions about ethical review of the study and whether or not the subjects were adequately protected from harm; however, most concluded that protection of human subjects was not an issue in this type of internet reserach. So, the scientific community was perplexed as to why the paper had been retracted. The publisher claimed in the retraction notice that “the legal context is insufficiently clear and therefore Frontiers [the publisher] wishes to retract the published article” (Lewandowsky et al., 2013, 2014). The notice made no claim of academic or ethical infraction. The notion of contextual issues spurred me to my next Google search: I searched for information on the context of research on public Internet postings, which yielded more than 20 million hits. It appears others have been thinking about this issue for a long time. Eysenback and Till (2001) concluded that although public Internet postings were a rich source of qualitative
Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners 26 (2014) 353–354
C 2014 American Association of Nurse Practitioners
material for health researchers, the publishing community was entering into the murky waters of new research ethics, particularly related to informed consent and privacy. A key issue is the context of Internet postings. Are the postings on public or private sites, and if private, how easy is it gain access to the site? Although participants in these online chat rooms or blog sites know they are commenting publicly, they may still believe that they are only commenting to legitimate members of their “community” (i.e., survivors of cancer, other people with mental illness, substance abusers, conspiracy theorists). Participants may resent researchers lurking in their “community” to mine participants’ comments for a scholarly analysis. Even if the researchers do not identify individuals in their manuscripts, any claim of protection of privacy by the researchers might be na¨ıve in this age of powerful search engines, particularly when blocks of text taken verbatim as examples and inserted into publications by the researchers can be used to find the original posting. The Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR: Markham & Buchanan, 2012) published a useful guide for conducting research using publicly available Internet postings. There are several issues of particular relevance to nurse researchers; these are also key questions in the debate over the “recursive fury” article. Protection of human subjects. It is undeniable that humans are somehow behind Internet postings, but in the context of research or institutional review boards (IRBs), originally created to protect human subjects in biomedical research, the concept of human subjects does not always fit with Internet research. Most of the Internet research I see in manuscripts submitted to JAANP has been declared exempt by IRBs; that is, the IRB does not see any need for full or even partial review of a research protocol involving “publicly available” content. This may work well for historical, social, or political, research, but if the context of the public commentary is not considered, individuals may be at risk. For example, a population of substance abusers in an online support group is far more vulnerable than a population of climate change deniers. Should there be special considerations for privacy protection or even a requirement for informed consent to use postings from the substance abusers? Protection of vulnerable populations at every point in the research
353
Editorial
process, even if it is not always clear exactly what the risk to an individual might be, is a key point in the AoIR guidelines. Expectations of privacy in the community. The context of the community contributes to individuals’ expectations of privacy. A private chat room carries greater expectations that no one who does not belong to the group, such as researchers, should be there. I have seen manuscripts where authors who belong to a private online community analyzed information that was shared within this context of an expectation of privacy. Even when an IRB has declared the research exempt, we will not publish such a paper in JAANP. In public spaces, the expectation of privacy may mean that exact quotations of participants, which could lead back directly to personal information about the person, should not be used. This is a problem for qualitative researchers who typically support their findings with specific quotes, which if modified for publication, may invalidate the researchers’ conclusions. Again, this is a situation that might not be solvable in an IRB application but should generate a thoughtful and objective analysis of ethical issues somewhere in the research process. Alternatively, as in the ‘recursive fury” debate, some have claimed the authors labeled individuals (as conspiracy theorists) in the public domain (Anderson, April 23, 2014), which created a violation of some expectation of privacy and possibly defamed some individuals. In my opinion, there is a big difference between being labeled a conspiracy theorist and being identified as a person with early-onset dementia. The method of research. If the research is intrusive, i.e., the researcher is actively involved in the community, or interviews participants, the community and each individual in it should be allowed to opt out and must be informed of any risks or benefits to participating. For example, if direct quotes are to be used, participants should be explicitly informed of this as well as the likelihood that quotes could be attributed to specific individuals (Eysenbach & Till, 2001). Potential hazards of participation in research are not always readily discernable to participants, and the hazard is often proportional to the vulnerability of the population. Researchers should also be aware that their known presence on a site might influence postings; this must be balanced with other ethical considerations. The benefit of the research should also be considered in relation to the potential harm. In some cases, the benefit will not outweigh the risks and even if
354
C. A. Pierson
all possible protections are observed, the manuscript may not pass peer review.
Take home messages for authors and researchers As a sociologist, I see the value of researching many aspects of our online lives. This is no different from researching how people make sense of their world and the actions of others around them; sociology, as an example, has a long history of ethnography, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and other similar methods to understand social interactions and institutions. Twitter, social media, YouTube, and blogs are impossible to ignore and provide a great resource for many people searching for answers to and support for complex psychosocial and medical situations. Ethical questions must be evaluated in light of a changing digital world. It is not safe to assume that all publicly available text is exempt from ethics oversight. When IRBs are not equipped to evaluate proposals for Internet research, the researchers themselves must lead the way. A good first step is to read the AoIR guidelines for Internet researchers (Markham & Buchanan, 2012) and join the dialogue of those interested in preserving a rational approach to these new technologies. The issues are complex now and will only become more complex as technology advances. We may not have seen the last of the “recursive furies.”
Charon A Pierson, PhD, GNP, FAAN, FAANP Editor-in-Chief
References Anderson, K. (April 9, 2014). Frontiers of Intimidation — What a Controversial Paper’s Travails Teach Us About Libel Laws and Publishing. Available at http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org Anderson, K. (April 23, 2014). Keeping it Real – Ethics and Privacy as the Frontiers “Recursive Fury” Case Continues to Churn. Available at http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org Eysenbach G., & Till, J. (2001). Ethical issues in qualitative research on internet communities. BMJ, 323, 1103–1105. Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Oberauer, K., & Marriott, M. (2013). Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 73. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073. Retracted by the publisher in Frontiers in Psychology, 27 March 2014 — doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00293 Markham, A., & Buchanan, E. (2012). Ethical decision-making and Internet research: Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0). Available at http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf
