Research Projects

Research Ethics in Online Environments

Based on some ethical dilemmas that arose in conducting my research on chatrooms, I have also examined how this new medium changes our notions of research ethics. I conducted an experimental study (Hudson & Bruckman, 2004) where I developed software agents that automatically entered several hundred publicly accessible chatrooms and told participants that I was studying "language use." Then, I examined how subjects responded to being studied. Results indicated that participants in chatrooms responded as if they are in a private space, even though the chatroom is publicly accessible. This mismatch between the expectations of privacy and the reality of privacy raises design challenges about how we can design better interfaces to convey more realistic expectations of privacy (Hudson & Bruckman, 2005). As a member of Georgia Tech's Institutional Review Board (IRB) from 2001 until 2005, I also looked at the implications of these results for the ethical conduct of Internet research (Hudson & Bruckman, 2004).

Publications

Hudson, J. M., & Bruckman, A. (2005). Using Empirical Data to Reason about Internet Research Ethics. Proceedings of the 2005 European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW), 287 - 306. Paris, France: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Hudson, J. M., & Bruckman, A. (2004). "Go Away": Participant Objections to Being Studied and the Ethics of Chatroom Research. The Information Society, 20(2), 127 - 139.