Hi Monica. The IRB related this to issues with confidentiality, noting that people who 'liked' the post on FB or RTed it on twitter could lose their confidentiality. They have now relented so that we can use Facebook, with very specific wording about NOT liking the post and instructions to people who wish to share it on their FB walls. I plan to talk with them more tomorrow as RTing or liking something on FB does not mean that you have responded to a survey, etc. And, I plan to note some of the things that members of AoIR and CITASA have suggested today. I will post a compilation later this week, hopefully after the IRB issue is resolved. Thanks. Shelia ________________________________________ From: Monica Barratt [tronica@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, September 26, 2011 7:06 PM To: Shelia Cotten Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] IRB and social media Hi Shelia Can I ask what rationale the IRB provides for not allowing social media recruitment? I think it is a good idea to get permissions from the owners/moderators of listservs/forums before posting a recruitment email to them (it's not that hard to contact them first and see if they support your research, and if they do, you can mention that in the recruitment email too). They may also be interested in seeing the results of your research so it can be good to build a relationship with such online groups rather than just posting the research and never coming back to the group. You can read about how we did it here: http://ijire.net/issue_3.1/6_barratt_lenton.pdf On a personal note, recently one of my research colleagues decided to post asking people to participate in her research on everybody's facebook walls, including mine. The research was about sexual partners and 'no strings attached' sex. I actually didn't want this on my wall - would have been fine with it in a private message. I felt that it was completely appropriate to post about the research to the news feed but when it came to posting it on my wall... seemed a bit too far, a bit too much like spam? Just my personal reaction. But in the end, I was completely free to delete it from my wall, no harm done regarding ethics... I guess the other thing I tend to think about when it comes to online recruitment is whether it will annoy people or whether people will feel that the method of recruitment is appropriate. As well as ethical! Thanks Steve for the article link about sociologists reluctant towards internet methods, the full link is here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-682X.2009.00318.x/abstract Cheers Monica Monica Barratt http://monicabarratt.net On 26 September 2011 23:57, Shelia Cotten <cotten@uab.edu> wrote:
Hi everyone. For my grad Survey Research course this semester, I'm planning to have my students do a web-based survey to be disseminated via social media. My IRB is giving us major issues with this. We had planned to use our social networks to disseminate the survey (in part this is a methodological experiment too) - so post on our Facebook walls, email people, post on listservs, and tweet it.
Our IRB doesn't want us to do anything other than email people basically. This seems so archaic given the proliferation of social media. If we are to use listservs, we have to get permission from each one and provide a letter to the IRB from each one.
Thoughts, suggestions, etc. for helping us deal with this issue?
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide! If you want to email me directly at cotten@uab.edu, I will be glad to post a summary of the responses.
Shelia
******************************************* Shelia R. Cotten, PhD Associate Professor Department of Sociology UAB 205-934-8678 cotten@uab.edu _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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