Analysis
couched in secrecy
Sociologists lurk on Net to examine
our behavior
By Dru Sefton, Special for USA TODAY
04/17/00- Updated 11:20 AM ET
The next time you're conversing in a
chat room or posting messages to an online bulletin
board, don't be surprised if a sociologist or
anthropologist pops in to ask you a few questions.
Or perhaps someone already is
examining your behavior without your knowing it.
As more mainstream users wander onto
the Web, researchers are following close behind. The
American Association for the Advancement of Science
sponsored a workshop last summer on the ethical and
legal implications of such research, the amount of
which, the association says, is "vast."
That's because "it's where the
people are," says David Jacobson, a Brandeis
University anthropology professor who studies
relationships in cyberspace.
But because there are no clear
guidelines for studying people online, social scientists
are left to decide on their own such complex questions
as:
- Are postings and archives in
online support groups public? Should researchers use
them?
- Do researchers have a
responsibility to make their presence known in chat
rooms?
- Can information gathered online,
where people often fabricate identities and
personalities, be considered scientifically sound?
An electronic publication, the Journal
of Online Behavior, last month joined a handful of
scholarly outlets for such research. Editor Joseph
Walther says JOB will explore the nature of Internet
associations and communication, the functioning of
groups, cyber-relationships, support groups and any
other interactions via computer. In sociological lingo,
that's "computer-mediated communication."
Online friends and 'smiley faces'
The journal's first article details
how people relate in a role-playing environment. German
psychologist Sonja Utz surveyed 103 players of an online
game in which users interact under fictional identities.
Among her conclusions: The more that players used
emoticons (little faces made of colons, parentheses and
other keyboard symbols), the more friendships they
formed.
Other recent Net research focuses on
such topics as conflict avoidance, whether people who
talk about sexually explicit topics worry about their
privacy (a Purdue researcher says no), and how often
online friends meet face to face (University of
Washington and University of Arizona researchers say
nearly 61% of participants surveyed had made a friend
online; a third of those had met face to face).
Walther, an associate professor of
communication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in
Troy, N.Y., expects the journal to include social
psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists, as well
as experts in communication and engineering. Walther's
research currently focuses on the reactions of
recipients to the use of emoticons in positive and
negative e-mail messages.
The millions of interactions on the
Internet provide social scientists with a unique
environment, Walther says. "For the first time,
researchers don't have to sneak around with cameras and
tape recorders and clipboards, trying to watch people
act naturally," he says. "That makes this an
interesting way to study human behavior in all its
forms."
But do researchers have a
responsibility to tell people they are being studied?
"If I were to log in to a chat
room and simply observe, I could record literally all
the text scrolling across the screen without mentioning
it to anybody - if I was unethical about it," says
Jacobson, who wrote about online research in the
November issue of the anthropological journal Field
Methods.
Researchers are entitled to public
information, he says, but defining what is public or
private on the Internet becomes complicated.
"Researchers often conceptualize publicly
accessible sites as public, even if subjects are
personal, such as in support groups," Jacobson
says. "But the people who participate, who post
personal comments, might feel that those comments are
private."
Barging in on support groups
Barbara Lackritz of St. Louis, a
cancer survivor, moderates 22 online support groups
through the Association of Cancer Online Resources. The
non-profit group sponsors dozens of groups with nearly
45,000 participants.
Lackritz is concerned about the
intrusion of social scientists. Researchers are
approaching the list managers with surveys for members
"more and more often now, which is why we had to
formulate a policy," she says. Most lists now state
that surveys must be cleared through list managers.
"And 99 out of 100 times, we approve," she
says, if the researcher is affiliated with a reputable
organization or project. If the managers learn
otherwise, or the researcher isn't forthcoming, the
request is denied.
A researcher recently posted a survey
without notifying the list manager. It was a survey
about attitudes toward online research.
Reactions to such postings vary from
the research subjects - participants of the online
support groups - Lackritz says. "It depends upon
the group of people on the list. It's not a
black-and-white thing. It is pretty universal, however,
that patients don't appreciate researchers listening in
on their conversations without first telling them."
No federal ethical guidelines
Professional anthropology, sociology
and psychology associations have ethical guidelines for
research, but the U.S. Office for Protection From
Research Risks, which oversees federally financed
studies of human subjects, has yet to address Net
research. In the offline world, it says, "most
observational research, except that involving children
and minors, is exempt from federal regulations."
That leaves researchers to rely on
common sense to fill "gaps between the new media
and the guidelines on traditional research,"
Walther says.
One of the goals of the 310-member
Association of Internet Researchers is "to
encourage socially responsible Internet research that
serves the common good." Its international
membership consists of scientific as well as marketing
researchers.
Online ethics are a "big
part" of the conversation on the group's e-mail
list, says Steve Jones, president of the group and head
of the communication department at the University of
Illinois at Chicago. "The Internet really does
force us to rethink the ethics. My hope is that it also
is going to force us to rethink our assumptions of
offline research as well."
For example, "we probably take
for granted that people who fill out mail surveys are
who they say they are, but we don't know that any more
than we do with Web-based surveys," he says. Such
issues will be discussed at the group's first conference
in September at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
"There are very few moments in
which new spaces open up in this fashion," Jones
says, "moments in which we see vistas appearing not
only for new research opportunities, but also for
rethinking of older methods and theories. It's rare to
have this sort of thing happen."
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