Ethical considerations

The Massey University Human Ethics Committee’s (MUHEC) screening questionnaire that analyses ethical research found this research project to be low risk; therefore, a low-risk notification application form was completed and lodged with MUHEC. The form outlined ethical considerations that had been discussed and reviewed with the researcher’s supervisors and other academic staff. Two major issues were considered regarding the viability of a low-risk ethics form: the issue of informed consent from those participating on the Facebook pages analysed, including the organisation; and the discussion around social media being a public or private platform.

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Issues around social media ethics have been thoroughly debated around data access (Mauthner & Parry, 2010), privacy, informed consent (McKee & Porter, 2009) and whether

information in social media spaces can be labelled public information (Thelwall, 2010). A particular debate surrounds the issue of whether content on the Internet is considered content or specifically attributed to human subjects. After a thorough discussion surrounding this debate, Walther (2002) determines that content made by a human subject can be retrieved by a researcher without informed consent if the content (i.e. – the communication material):

 Does not have to be accessed through a password-protected site (i.e. – the content is public);

 Does not directly use any information about a human subject (e.g. – their age, demographics, interests or habits) and;

 Ensures the anonymity of any human subject whose content is used in the study.

Bearing Walther’s (2002) conclusions in mind, this study can confidently assert that informed consent is not required; however, some more contextual elements should be discussed. Facebook’s platform is a mix or public and private spaces, with the level of visibility altered to user’s preferred privacy levels. While many Facebook users have strict privacy settings where most of their

information or wall posts are visible only to their friends or networks, organisation and brand pages are often public and are mostly visible to any Internet users and not just Facebook users. Even if a Facebook user has the highest privacy settings, any of their posts on a public Facebook page can be viewed by the public. The implications of this are specifically laid out in Facebook’s terms and conditions (see Facebook, 2011a, 2011b); however the jump from different privacy settings on the same platform has ethical implications for researchers. Facebook users may ‘publicly’ post on an

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organisation’s wall without thought or regard for its public nature because their own personal settings are of a private nature.

In any case, this study minimises any risk to individual Facebook users because the content analysis methodology allows the Facebook users to be classed statistically. The only information gathered by the researcher is their Facebook usernames and the content they post on the public Facebook page. Their personal pages were never traced in the study. Information or data from the Facebook users are not published in this study: the original data is only accessible to the researcher and supervisors. To minimise further risk of harm to individuals, the data presented is in collective form and is presented in means of frequencies and trends. If particular data is singled out, for example a quote from the content, then no other data such as numerical ID number, date and time of the content is recorded alongside it.

Organisations are identified by name in this study; however, it was discussed between the researcher and supervisors that any information made public by an organisation – whether it be a conversation on a public Facebook page, a speech to a crowd, information on a brochure or website, or a statement to the media – is deemed open to public scrutiny. MUHEC asked for clarification on seeking permission to analyse organisations’ Facebook pages from the organisations; however, further discussion with reference to the literature found this to be unnecessary and ethics approval was gained.

One further consideration with the research revolved around access from the data. This issue is especially important after Lewis, Kaufman, Gonzalez, Wimmer and Christakis’ (2008) controversial Facebook study that used students to collect the data off other student’s Facebook pages, which may have given them information that would not have been ‘publicly’ available (Parry, 2011). As

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stated previously, the data recorded in this study can be accessed without being part of the Facebook network (no password to access the data is required), and can therefore be deemed public information. Facebook terms and conditions inform their users that anything they post on public pages can be used as a public archive. Discussion with supervisors have also led to a decision that social media has now been around long enough for social media users to understand the public nature of platforms like Facebook.

3.8 Conclusion

This chapter has outlined why content analysis was chosen as a method for this research and the procedures undertaken to guide the data in answering the research questions. A direction was set for the analysis of the data collected and ethical concerns were addressed. The following chapter presents the results of the data collection, which will be discussed in light of the research questions in chapter five.

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