In his latest blog, Anthony Shephard-Williams (director) explores how ethics plays a pivotal part of the online research community experience.
Over the years I’ve researched many different topics within online communities at Mustard. Sometimes these are fun and light hearted (who doesn’t love talking about their dogs, cats or children?!) but other times they can be extremely serious and even contentious – topics such as euthanasia, gambling addiction, cancer experiences, how religion impacts perceptions of environmental issues and crippling debt to name but a few.
For the more serious topics, the discussion threads that need to be covered can be quite close to the bone and potentially triggering for both research participants and moderators alike.
So how do we go about ensuring our participants feel safe and that the research is conducted in a responsible way?
1.Getting consent: It is essential that research participants fully understand the ‘ask’. We need to clearly explain what the community is about, what sort of topics we will cover, what the purpose is and how their feedback will be used. Participants are then able to give their informed consent to take part.
2.Managing expectations around respect from the get go: Online research communities can attract participants from really diverse backgrounds and cultures, and this means some will have very different opinions. We ask all of our participants to read and agree to T&C’s for taking part, before even getting started.
3.Respecting privacy and confidentiality: Researchers must ensure that the data collected from participants in communities is kept private and confidential. With some of our more serious topics we can ensure that participants full anonymity is protected (by setting them up with a username of their choice or asking them not to upload a profile picture) or use different settings within the community platform to set how topics are presented (for example, we can ensure some topics are completely private so that no other community participants can see responses).
4.Framing topics so that being respectful is front of mind: We consider all types of topics we’re going to cover and ‘risk assess’ them to gauge whether we think there could be any areas where conflict may occur. If there is the slightest chance of a topic being considered contentious, then we will ensure the introduction to that topic frames the discussion in a way that that participants know that they need to be respectful of others’ opinions (this works 99.99% of the time. In my 14 years at Mustard, I have only had to remove one participant from a community project). If framed correctly, a bit of conflict can also lead to a healthy debate!
5.Keeping participants safe: As researchers, we have to ensure that our projects do not cause any physical, psychological, or emotional harm to participants (this is true of any research methodology, not just communities). We design our research to minimise the impact on participants, but we also know that sometimes we need to ask those hard-hitting questions. In recent communities we’ve created clear processes, so that participants can express if something is getting a bit too much for them (of course participants always know that they can say ‘prefer not to say’) or if they need a break / need further support.
In summary, it’s really important to consider how research participation can impact both participants and researchers alike and to always consider respectfulness and mindfulness with more serious subject matters.
If you have any questions about online communities, we’d love to hear from you, feel free to get in touch anthony.shephard-williams@mustard-research.com.