Ethic and Credibility Workshop

Directions:

This workshop consists of a self-paced slide show, tasks for you to complete, as well as links and basic information below. The slides are available in Keynote and PDFs (PDFs are accessible for screen readers). These slides are plain and designed to download fast and simply provide you with information you need for this course. You must submit the required materials here AND participate in the physical class workshop for credit.

Keynote: Ethics_Info_Quality_151i_hybrid_2015.key Download Ethics_Info_Quality_151i_hybrid_2015.key

PDF: Ethics_Info_Quality_151i_hybrid_2015.pdf Download Ethics_Info_Quality_151i_hybrid_2015.pdf

Read the material below, watch the videos, download the slides, complete the task, submit to Canvas, and participate in the physical class meeting

Make sure to participate in the Week 2 Workshop/Process Discussion on this workshop

To earn credit you need to complete the following tasks.

You are a regular visitor to a sub-Reddit discussion board Links to an external site.. This board to open on the web so anyone can read it. You decide to research how people interact with each other, address other users and ask/answer questions. You goal is to collect data and write-up your finding and publish them in an academic journal.

1. What are 3 potential ethical issues of this research for you as the researcher? That is, as the one conducting the study what are some ethical pitfalls you might encounter based on the workshop discussion.
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages for the researcher of getting informed consent in this situation? List at least two for each.
3. Is there potential harm in such a study? What actions by the researcher either in conducting or publishing the research, could cause harm to the group, venue, or its members? If so what? If not, why not? 
4. For credit on this assignment you must submit to Canvas answers to the questions posed above and come to the in class workshop.

Link Links to an external site.Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

This Guide is from William H. Dutton, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/dutton/2010/02/05/principles-to-guide-research-ethics-in-the-social-sciences/ 

Six Principles to Guide Research Ethics in the Social Sciences

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has published a revised ‘Framework for Research Ethics (FRE)’, which is available in full on the Web. This highlights six key principles of ethical research — principles that the ‘ESRC expects to be addressed whenever applicable — are:

1. Research should be designed, reviewed and undertaken to ensure integrity, quality and transparency.
2.  Research staff and participants must normally be informed fully about the purpose, methods and intended possible uses of the research, what their participation in the research entails and what risks, if any, are involved.
3. The confidentiality of information supplied by research participants and the anonymity of respondents must be respected.
4. Research participants must take part voluntarily, free from any coercion.
5. Harm to research participants must be avoided in all instances.
6. The independence of research must be clear, and any conflicts of interest or partiality must be explicit.

In addition, the report highlights key procedural issues for implementing these principles:

• The responsibility for conduct of the research in line with relevant principles rests with the principal investigator and the research / employing organization.
• The responsibility for ensuring that research is subject to appropriate ethics review, approval and monitoring lies with the research organization seeking or holding an award with the ESRC and which employs the researchers performing it, or some of the researchers when it is acting as the co-ordinator for collaborative research involving more than one organization.
• Research organizations should have clear, transparent, appropriate and effective procedures in place for ethics review, approval and governance whenever it is  necessary.
• Risks should be minimized.
• Research should be designed in a way that the dignity and autonomy of research participants is protected and respected at all times.
• Ethics review should always be proportionate to the potential risk, whether this involves primary or secondary data.
• Whilst the secondary use of some datasets may be relatively uncontroversial, and require only light touch ethics review, novel use of existing data and especially data linkage, as well as some uses of administrative and secure data will raise issues of ethics.
• Research involving primary data collection will always raise issues of ethics that must be addressed.

This chart is from the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Ethical Decision Making and Internet Rsearch Report (2012) http://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf Links to an external site.

Link Links to an external site.

Author Clay A. Johnson recommends dropping 'overprocessed' information from your media diet

By Sue McAllister

smcallister@mercurynews.com

Posted: 01/28/2012 12:00:00 AM PST

Open-government advocate Clay Johnson cofounded Blue State Digital, a firm that engineered Barack Obama's 2008 online presidential campaign. But after years in Washington, D.C., Johnson, now 34, began to realize that, though he'd been working for years to make government data more accessible to regular citizens, those citizens were not always interested in going directly to the source.

In his new book "The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption" (O'Reilly Media, Inc.), Johnson says Americans' reliance on "overprocessed information" from cable news shows and websites run by big media companies is similar to our overindulgence in sweet, fat, unhealthy food. And, he writes, our poor information diets can affect the body politic just as negatively as consumption of too much sugar or junk food affects public health.

An interview with Johnson, below, has been edited for length and clarity.

Q What's unhealthy about our information consumption?

A The problem is, we are wired to seek out affirmation rather than to seek out information. Who on earth would want to hear the truth when they can hear they're right? You get all kind of endorphins when you hear you are right. Affirmation helped us create communities and survive as a tribe, but now to an extent it can start distorting the lens you use to view the world.

Q What's an example of a poor information diet? Clicking on too many Kim Kardashian stories?

A Yeah, or a liberal tuning into the Huffington Post all day long, or a conservative getting their entire news diet from Fox News. It's also being ignorant of the intent of the news.

Q Why is it bad to hew to information that we already agree with?

A Sometimes it's because that information isn't true. The other thing is it's sort of a narcotic.

Q So how do we improve?

A Go local, stick to the sources that are closest to you ... that's your family and your friends, first and foremost, and it's your local news sources.

The second thing, I call it being an "infovegan." It's avoiding that processed stuff and learning to use the same source material that the media does. The Internet has made that stuff available. Instead of watching Fox News' coverage of the health care debates, watch the health care debates.

And the one piece of universal advice is to measure your (information) intake. Just like keeping a food journal, keeping an information diet diary can help you build a healthy framework for information consumption. When I first started, I was shocked with the amount of time I was spending watching television.

Q Where do you stand on the use of social media?

A I wouldn't know that my second cousin had a baby if it weren't for Facebook. There is a ton of healthy information on Facebook and Twitter. The key here is to be conscious about it, and be aware that your attention is a currency that these services are trying to get.

Q What are the consequences of consuming information poorly?

A Your information diet is not just about your own physical and mental health; it's an ethical decision that affects other people. So when you look at the Huffington Post, for example, the articles at the bottom of the page that get a lot of clicks start to float up to the top. So (if) you are watching that Kim Kardashian video, you and other people like you are making it more probable that that video will get attention. The unspoken pact between producers and consumers is that people are asking for junk, and large companies are providing them with it.

Q Any hope of changing that cycle?

A If enough of us generate enough demand for high-quality content that is transparent for its readers and empowers readers to go to sources ... then we will force the market to follow.

Q What habits did you change since you began researching the book?

A I canceled cable. I get the TV shows I want to see from Hulu or Netflix. There is no sitting down in front of the TV with stuff streaming at you until the day is gone.