Abstract
The adaptable nature of the Internet to accommodate new behavior lends itself to the need for ethical practices to be flexible. However, current ethical guidelines are not adaptable to an online context and online research has yet to identify principles that are agreed upon across disciplines. Additionally, the current guidelines are not able to address issues related to the use of online panels for Internet research. The increased use of online panels presents questions related not only to traditional concepts of ethics, but also to the exploitation of online work. Issues of appropriate online ethical research are not limited to how they can better serve research, however, as the creation of these guidelines requires the consideration of how too strict of guidelines may hinder future research. Currently, the conservative and cautious nature of the United States’ Institutional Review Board is already being questioned for overreaching in their consideration of what ethical research is. The chapter concludes with proposed steps for develo** more viable ethical guidelines in online research.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Casler, K., Bickel, L., & Hackett, E. (2013). Separate but equal? A comparison of participants and data gathered via Amazon’s MTurk, social media, and face-to-face behavioral testing. Computers in Human Behavior,29(6), 2156–2160.
Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative. (n.d.). Research, ethics, and compliance training. Available at: https://about.citiprogram.org/en/homepage/.
Cross, C. (2019). Is online fraud just fraud? Examining the efficacy of the digital divide. Journal of Criminological Research, Policy and Practice,5(2), 120–131.
Eysenbach, G., & Till, J. E. (2001). Ethical issues in qualitative research on Internet communities. British Medical Journal,323, 1103–1105.
Haggerty, K. D. (2004). Ethics creep: Governing social science research in the name of ethics. Qualitative Sociology,27(4), 391–414.
Holt, T. J., Burrus, G. W., & Bossler, A. (2016). Policing cybercrime and cyberterror. Security Journal,29, e13–e15.
Holt, T. J., Strumsky, D., Smirnova, O., & Kilger, M. (2012). Examining the social networks of malware writers and hackers. International Journal of Cyber Criminology,6(1), 891–903.
Hudson, J. M., & Bruckman, A. (2005). Using empirical data to reason about Internet research ethics. In Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 287–306).
Irani, L., & Silberman, M. S. (2009). Agency and exploitation in Mechanical. In Internet as Playground and Factory Conference.
Markham, A., & Buchanan, E. (2012). Ethical decision-making and Internet research: Version 2.0. Recommendations from the AoIR working committee.
Mason, W., & Suri, S. (2012). Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s mechanical turk. Behavior Research Methods,44, 1–23.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. HarperCollins.
Nind, M., Wiles, R., Bengry-Howell, A., & Crow, G. (2013). Methodological innovation and research ethics: Forces in tension or forces in harmony? Qualitative Research,13(6), 650–667.
Pittman, M., & Sheehan, K. (2017). Ethics of using online commercial crowdsourcing sites for academic research: The case of Amazon’s mechanical turk. In M. Zimmer & K. Kinder-Kurlanda (Eds.), Internet research ethics for the social age. Peter Lang.
Rosenberg, A. (2010). Virtual world research ethics and private/public distribution. International Journal of Research Ethics,3(12), 23–37.
Smith. H. J., Dinev, T., & Xu, H. (2011). Information privacy research: An interdisciplinary review. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 35(4), 989–1015.
Sugiura, L., Wiles, R., & Pope, C. (2017). Ethical challenges in online research: Public/private perceptions. Research Ethics,13(3–4), 184–199.
The Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, 45 C.F.R. § 46. (2018).
Thomas, W. I., & Znaniecki, F. (1996). The Polish peasant in Europe and America: A classic work in immigration history. University of Illinois Press.
Thompson, A. J., & Pickett, J. T. (2020). Are relational inferences from crowdsourced and opt-in samples generalizable? Comparing criminal justice attitudes in the GSS and five online samples. Journal of Quantitative Criminology,36, 907–932.
Tsakalidis, G., & Vergidis, K. (2017). A systematic approach toward description and classification of cybercrime incidents. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems,49(4), 710–729.
Tyler, T. R. (2006). Why people obey the law. Princeton University Press.
Vitak, J., Proferes, N., Shilton, K., & Ashktorab, Z. (2017). Ethics regulation in social computing research: Examining the role of institutional review boards. Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics,12(5), 372–382.
Vitak, J., Shilton, K., & Ashktorab, Z. (2016). Beyond the Belmont principles: Ethical challenges, practices, and beliefs in the online data research community. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 941–953).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Amory, K., Burruss, G.W. (2021). Conducting Ethical Research with Online Populations in the United States. In: Lavorgna, A., Holt, T.J. (eds) Researching Cybercrimes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74837-1_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74837-1_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-74836-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-74837-1
eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)