Knowing and Knowing Well

Nearly 700,000 people

Facebook and Cornell, published June 2014

• For one week in January 2012, Facebook manipulated users’ News Feeds
• Some saw fewer positive posts from friends. Others saw fewer negative posts.
• Researchers then measured what those users posted themselves
• It worked: less positive input produced slightly more negative output
• Published in PNAS as evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion

The reaction

• Nearly 700,000 people were enrolled with no informed consent
• No one was told. No one could decline.
• Facebook argued its terms of service authorized “research”
• Researchers argued the effect was tiny and the knowledge valuable
• PNAS appended an editorial expression of concern, an unusual step

Ethics is a disposition, not a form

• It is tempting to treat ethics as a training module between you and the data
• It shapes how you think about your relationship to the people you study
• It governs how honestly you report what you find
• The protections exist because researchers caused real harm, systematically
• Reasonable people still disagree about the Facebook study. That is the point.

Tuskegee, 1932 to 1972

• The U.S. Public Health Service studied untreated syphilis in 399 Black men
• The men were told they were receiving free treatment for “bad blood”
• Penicillin became standard in the 1940s. The researchers withheld it.
• 28 died directly of syphilis, 100 of complications, 40 wives were infected, 19 children were born with congenital syphilis
• Federally funded, peer-reviewed, and unchallenged for forty years

Milgram, 1961

• Recruited by newspaper advertisement, told it was a study of memory and learning
• Cast as the “teacher”; a confederate played the “learner” in the next room
• Told to deliver escalating shocks for wrong answers, up to a switch marked 450 volts
• The shocks were not real. The belief that they were, and the distress, were.
• 26 of 40 in the baseline condition went all the way to the maximum
• Hesitating got a scripted prod, “the experiment requires that you continue”, rather than permission to stop

Milgram, what it cost

• Milgram reported participants sweating, trembling, stuttering, and one seizure violent enough to stop the session
• The deception was total until the debriefing afterwards
• The findings reshaped how the field understands obedience to authority, and they are still taught in every introductory course
• Whether that knowledge justified the distress has never been settled
• Which is the point: he was neither careless nor malicious

Humphreys, 1970

• Doctoral research on anonymous sexual encounters between men in public restrooms
• He took the role of watchqueen, the lookout, which let him observe without taking part and without saying he was a researcher
• He wrote down the license plates of the men he observed
• He traced those plates to home addresses through motor vehicle records, reached through a contact in the police
• About a year later he changed his appearance and his car, and interviewed those men in their own homes, posing as an interviewer on an unrelated health survey

Humphreys, what it cost

• Most of the men were married and living otherwise conventional lives
• In 1970 exposure meant criminal prosecution, lost jobs, and ruined families
• He kept the data secure, and argued the work reduced stigma by showing who these men actually were
• The book won a major award in sociology, and his own department fought over whether to take his doctorate away
• Both of those are true at once, which is why it is still assigned

The common thread

• Every one of these researchers believed the work served a greater good
• Every one produced participants who were harmed, deceived, or exploited
• Good intentions are not sufficient protection
• Researchers need external accountability and formal principles
• Tuskegee’s exposure in 1972 produced the framework we use today

Belmont: respect for persons

National Commission, 1979

• People are autonomous agents capable of making their own decisions
• Informed consent: understand the research, the risks, and the right to withdraw without penalty
• Protection of vulnerable populations: children, prisoners, people with cognitive impairments, whose voluntary consent is compromised
• Public social media complicates this, and we come back to it

Belmont: beneficence and justice

• Beneficence, do no harm: no physical, psychological, social, or economic injury to participants
• And maximize the benefit-to-risk ratio: the knowledge must justify the risk
• Justice: benefits and burdens distributed fairly across groups
• Tuskegee violated justice directly: all risk on a marginalized population, the knowledge accruing to everyone else

Institutional review

• An IRB reviews a study before data collection: risk minimization, equitable selection, consent, privacy and confidentiality
• Expedited: no more than minimal risk. Many surveys and interview studies with adults.
• Full board: more than minimal risk, vulnerable populations, or deception
• Exempt: minimal risk, inside categories federal regulation names
• The IRB makes the determination, not you. You submit. The board decides.

The question that comes first

Before any of that, there is a prior question: is this human subjects research at all?

Federal regulation defines a human subject as a living person about whom you obtain information either through intervention or interaction with them, or as identifiable private information.

• You never interact with anyone. The messages were sent before you arrived.
• They were broadcast publicly, so they are not private information.
• Neither part is met, so this is not human subjects research, and the three levels above never come into it

The Twitch data through Belmont

• Collected from Twitch’s public IRC interface and public API
• No IP addresses, no emails, no user IDs, no payment data, no whispers
• Usernames are present but pseudonymous: chosen handles, not legal names
• Respect: the case rests on public broadcast, not on consent
• Beneficence: minimal risk. Justice: no group bears disproportionate burden

This determination has been made twice already

• Not hypothetical. The Twitch data in front of you was formally determined not human subjects research by Michigan State University, and the Twitter data from the NSF work was determined the same way by SIUE.
• Your project is expected to land in the same place: a content analysis of public broadcast content is not human subjects research.
• The university makes that call, never the researcher. You do not file anything for this course, because the determination already exists for this data.
• Carry work like this past the course, into a thesis or a job, and requesting the determination becomes your job
• You still do CITI, because the training is what lets you make the argument, and because the next dataset you meet may not be this clean

Public does not mean fair game

• AoIR has long argued that public accessibility is not automatic permission (Markham & Buchanan, 2012)
• So: do not aggregate in ways that re-identify individual users
• Do not republish entire chat logs verbatim
• Do not amplify messages whose senders expected obscurity more than broadcast
• The cleanness of this dataset is a starting point, not a license

Three cases that would be human subjects research

Same research question, different data, different determination:

• Twitch whispers. Private messages, reasonable expectation of privacy. Expedited or full review.
• A private Discord server, same people. Closed membership, stronger privacy expectation. Expedited or full.
• An internal moderation log with platform flags on named users. Risk of harm to identified individuals. Full board likely.

Consent gets complicated

• Deception is sometimes justified, and always paired with mandatory debriefing plus the option to withdraw your data
• Passive consent, the terms-of-service move, is generally insufficient. Ethicists prefer active consent: an affirmative act.
• Secondary analysis of someone else’s data raises whether the original consent covered your use. Generally acceptable when de-identified.
• This last one is where research ethics is still actively evolving

Honest reporting is an ethical obligation

• Fabrication: inventing data. Falsification: manipulating results. Both are fraud and both are career-ending.
• Selective reporting: running many analyses, publishing only the ones that worked. This distorts the literature.
• HARKing: Hypothesizing After the Results are Known, then writing as though you predicted it. A postdiction carries none of a prediction’s weight.
• “Our results suggest” quietly becomes “our results demonstrate.” Watch for it.

CITI, and what it actually is

CITI is the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative, the research ethics training nearly every American university runs. You complete the Social and Behavioral Research course and submit the completion certificate.

• The modules walk the ground we just walked: the history, the principles, consent, privacy and confidentiality, assessing risk, vulnerable populations
• Each module ends in a quiz you have to pass
• It takes hours rather than minutes, and it saves your place, so do it in pieces
• Due Friday, September 25, 25 points

Where to actually go

Two pages, and the order matters:

1. SIUE Compliance Training first. This is the route in, and it tells you how to attach your account to SIUE.
2. CITI Program to register and work through the modules.

Register through SIUE, not as an “independent learner.” The independent route charges you money and the certificate does not come back to the university, so it will not count. If you have already made an account that way, say so and we will sort it out.

Why it applies to you anyway

A fair question, given the last ten minutes: if your project is not human subjects research, why train for human subjects research?

• Because “this is not human subjects research” is an argument you have to be able to make, and CITI is where you learn to make it
• Because the moment a project touches people directly, no IRB will look at you without it
• Because it travels. Graduate programs and research jobs ask to see it.
• Start it this week. Somebody every term starts the night before and discovers it is not a twenty-minute task.

Before next time

• Read Chapter 4, Intelligence Gathering, before Thursday
• Thursday is database searching. No librarian visits us, so you book your own at Lovejoy and that meeting is the assignment. Bring a laptop and a topic you are curious about.
• Bring one thing you want to be able to find in the literature
• CITI Ethics Certification is coming. Start it early, it takes real hours.
• Journal entry on Chapter 3 closes the week