[Air-l] Re: Great Ethical disasters in Internet Research?

[Bram Dov Abramson]

>This is a very important point.  The unfortunate reality is that academic 
>research is not done in isolation from private sector "consumer research" 
>when it comes to potential respondents.  As far as I understand, private 
>corporations don't have human subjects guidelines to abide by like 
>academics do.

Ah, but Google claims otherwise ...

APRM-PMRS Rules of Conduct
http://www.pmrs-aprm.com/What/RulesA01.html?

MRA: Code of Data Collection Standards
http://www.mra-net.org/docs/industry/code_dcs.cfm

MRS: Professional Standards
http://www.mrs.org.uk/code.htm

MRSA: Code of Professional Behaviour
http://www.mrsa.com.au/index.cfm?a=detail&id=115&eid=13

... and so forth.  I make it a point to read the magazine produced by a 
(perhaps the) professional marketing research association here in Canada 
(APRM-PMRS), and the telemarketing-tragedy-in-the-commons issue is very 
much a hot topic there, where a sense that bad data collection drives out 
good has very much been internalized.

Generally, I think that the divide posited between academics and private 
corporations is less germane than the one between disciplines.  Marketing 
researchers in academia and the private sector work fairly closely 
together, but they and their counterparts in sociology and demographics, 
statistics, psychology, and other similarly-interested disciplines don't 
appear -- that is, from my limited vantage point -- to chat as often as 
might be in their interests on such matters.

I wonder whether an organisation like AOIR mightn't be well-placed to help 
open that conversation up, given the absence of any given discipline's 
monopoly (well, one hopes) over so-called "Internet studies".  In which 
case, academic research's lack of isolation from private-sector work might 
helpfully be regarded less as unfortunate, than as a fortunate point from 
which to build a baseline set of guidelines ... atop which any disciplinary 
or organisational entities should, it goes without saying, feel quite 
justified in wishing to layer their own sets of rules.

cheers
Bram