Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

The capabilities offered to psychology researchers by new technology have catapulted the field toward a deeper understanding of people’s social experiences. However, it concurrently increases the need to consider the ethical and legal concerns of capturing information about bystanders. This article outlines the legal and ethical issues that researchers should consider when conducting social environment sampling research. The goal is to serve as a “quick start guide” to the unique legal and ethical challenges that arise with social environment sampling, and to offer some solutions.

Keywords

EAR ambulatory assessment social media EMA lifelogging

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anderson

Fagan

Woodnutt

Chamorro-Premuzic

(2012). Facebook psychology: Popular questions answered by research. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 1, 23.

Barker

R. G.

Wright

H. F.

(1951). One boy’s day: A specimen record of behavior. Oxford, England: Harper.

Ben-Zeev

Wang

Abdullah

Brian

Scherer

E. A.

Mistler

L. A.

… Choudhury

(2016). Mobile behavioral sensing for outpatients and inpatients with schizophrenia. Psychiatric Services, 67, 558–561. doi:10.1176/appi.ps.201500130

Brown

N. A.

Blake

A. B

Sherman

R. A.

(in press). A snapshot of the life as lived: Wearable cameras in social and personality psychological science. Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Buchanan

E. A.

(2011). Internet research ethics: Past, present, and future. The Handbook of Internet Studies, 11, 83.

Buchanan

Williams

J. E.

(2010). Ethical issues in psychological research on the internet. In Gosling

S. D.

Johnson

J. A.

(Eds.), Advanced methods for conducting online behavioral research (pp. 255–271). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

California Penal Code § 632. (2016).

Carey

A. L.

Brucks

M. S.

Küfner

A. C.

Holtzman

N. S.

Back

M. D.

Donnellan

M. B.

… Mehl

M. R.

(2015). Narcissism and the use of personal pronouns revisited. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109, e1–e15.

Eavesdropping upon private conversation, Michigan Penal Code § 750.539c (2015).

10.

Eysenbach

Powell

Englesakis

Rizo

Stern

(2004). Health related virtual communities and electronic support groups: Systematic review of the effects of online peer to peer interactions. British Medical Journal, 328, 1166.

11.

Eysenbach

Till

J. E.

(2001). Ethical issues in qualitative research on internet communities. British Medical Journal, 323, 1103–1105. doi:10.1136/bmj.323.7321.1103

12.

Facebook Data Policy. (2015). Retrieved August 10, 2016, from https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/

13.

Hodges

Berry

Wood

(2011). SenseCam: A wearable camera that stimulates and rehabilitates autobiographical memory. Memory, 19, 685–696.

14.

Interception and Disclosure of Wire, Oral, or Electronic Communications Prohibited, 18 U.S.C.S. § 2511 (2011).

15.

Kacewicz

Pennebaker

J. W.

Davis

Jeon

Graesser

A. C.

(2014). Pronoun use reflects standings in social hierarchies. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33, 125–143. doi:10.1177/0261927X13502654

16.

Kelly

Marshall

S. J.

Badland

Kerr

Oliver

Doherty

A. R.

Foster

(2013). An ethical framework for automated, wearable cameras in health behavior research. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 44, 314–319.

17.

Kraut

Olson

Banaji

Bruckman

Cohen

Couper

(2004). Psychological research online: Report of board of scientific affairs’ advisory group on the conduct of research on the Internet. American Psychologist, 59, 105.

18.

Manson

J. H.

Robbins

M. L.

(2017). New evaluation of the electronically activated recorder (EAR): Obtrusiveness, compliance, and participant self-selection effects. Frontiers in Psychology. Advance online publication. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00658

19.

Matthiesen

B. W.

Wickert

G. L.

Lehrer

D. W.

(2016). Laws on recording conversations in all 50 states. Retrieved July 20, 2016, from https://www.mwl-law.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/LAWS-ON-RECORDING-CONVERSATIONS-CHART.pdf

20.

Mehl

M. R.

Conner

T. S.

(Eds.). (2012). Handbook of research methods for studying daily life. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

21.

Mehl

M. R.

Gosling

S. D.

Pennebaker

J. W.

(2006). Personality in its natural habitat: Manifestations and implicit folk theories of personality in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 862.

22.

Mehl

M. R.

Pennebaker

J. W.

(2003). The sounds of social life: A psychometric analysis of students’ daily social environments and natural conversations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 857–870. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.84.4.857

23.

Mehl

M. R.

Pennebaker

J. W.

Crow

D. M.

Dabbs

Price

J. H.

(2001). The Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR): A device for sampling naturalistic daily activities and conversations. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 33, 517–523.

24.

Mehl

M. R.

Robbins

M. L.

Deters

F. große

. (2012). Naturalistic observation of health-relevant social processes: The Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) methodology in psychosomatics. Psychosomatic Medicine, 74, 410–417. doi:10.1097/PSY.0b013e3182545470

25.

Mehl

M. R.

Vazire

Ramírez-Esparza

Slatcher

R. B.

Pennebaker

J. W.

(2007). Are women really more talkative than men? Science, 317, 82–82.

26.

Miller

(2012). The smartphone psychology manifesto. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 221–237.

27.

National Institutes of Health. (2004). HIPAA privacy rule and its impacts on research. Retrieved August 12, 2016, from https://privacyruleandresearch.nih.gov/clin_research.asp

28.

Pennebaker

J. W.

Groom

C. J.

Loew

Dabbs

J. M.

(2004). Testosterone as a social inhibitor: Two case studies of the effect of testosterone treatment on language. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 113, 172.

29.

Ramirez-Esparza

Garcia-Sierra

Kuhl

P. K.

(2010). Naturalistic social communication and speech development in monolingual and bilingual infants. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 128, 2459–2459.

30.

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. (2012). Reporter’s recording guide: A state-by-state guide to taping phone calls and in-person conversations. Retrieved May 23, 2016, from http://www.rcfp.org/rcfp/orders/docs/RECORDING.pdf

31.

Restatement of the Law, Second, Torts, � 652. (n.d.). Retrieved December 12, 2016, from https://cyber.harvard.edu/privacy/Privacy_R2d_Torts_Sections.htm

32.

Robbins

M. L.

López

A. M.

Weihs

K. L.

Mehl

M. R.

(2014). Cancer conversations in context: Naturalistic observation of couples coping with breast cancer. Journal of Family Psychology, 28, 380–390. doi:10.1037/a0036458

33.

Robbins

M. L.

Wright

R. C.

Karan

Baranski

(2016). EAR repository. Retrieved August 1, 2016, from https://osf.io/n2ufd/

34.

Ryan

M. L.

Shochet

I. M.

Stallman

H. M.

(2010). Universal online interventions might engage psychologically distressed university students who are unlikely to seek formal help. Advances in Mental Health, 9, 73–83. doi:10.5172/jamh.9.1.73

35.

Scholand

A. J.

Tausczik

Y. R.

Pennebaker

J. W.

(2010). Social language network analysis. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 23–26). ACM. Retrieved August 11, 2016, from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718925

36.

Security of Communications; Surveillance, Fla. Stat. § 934.02. (2016).

37.

Slatcher

R. B.

Pennebaker

J. W.

(2006). How do I love thee? Let me count the words the social effects of expressive writing. Psychological Science, 17, 660–664.

38.

Staff

L. I. I.

(2007, 8 6). Trespass. Retrieved December 12, 2016, from https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/trespass

39.

Student Press Law Center. (2016). When it comes to social media, some old-school legal rules may not apply. Retrieved August 10, 2016, from http://www.splc.org/article/2014/08/when-it-comes-to-social-media-some-old-school-legal-rules-may-not-apply

40.

Sun

Fernstrom

J. D.

Jia

Hackworth

S. A.

Yao

… Sclabassi

R. J.

(2010). A wearable electronic system for objective dietary assessment. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 110, 45.

41.

Tausczik

Y. R.

Chung

C. K.

Pennebaker

J. W.

(2016). Tracking secret-keeping in emails. Proceedings of the Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2016), 388–397.

42.

Worringham

Rojek

Stewart

(2011). Development and feasibility of a smartphone, ECG and GPS based system for remotely monitoring exercise in cardiac rehabilitation. PloS One, 6, e14669.

43.

Wright

(2013). Court finds non-public facebook posts are covered by the stored communications act – But not posts produced by a user’s frenemy | employer law report. Retrieved November 28, 2016, from http://www.employerlawreport.com/2013/08/articles/social-media-2/court-finds-non-public-facebook-posts-are-covered-by-the-stored-communications-act-but-not-posts-produced-by-a-users-frenemy/

44.

Zimmer

(2010). “But the data is already public”: On the ethics of research in Facebook. Ethics and Information Technology, 12, 313–325.

45.

Zimmer

Proferes

N. J.

(2014). A topology of Twitter research: Disciplines, methods, and ethics. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 66, 250–261.

Practical Suggestions for Legal and Ethical Concerns With Social Environment Sampling Methods

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References