The third and final unit of Module Two examines best ethical practices in digital research. Before beginning this unit, read the following materials, which provide an introduction to hashtag research with an emphasis on race.

Following these readings, watch Dr. Catherine Knight Steele’s videos on interrogating your own ethical code and best ethical practices with regard to digital research. The video referenced on slide 20 can be found here, and the slides for these two videos can be found here.

This unit also includes an introduction to the Institutional Review Board (IRB) application process, which is both important and often daunting. This process is made more complicated when you have never had to apply for a human subjects review before or haven’t done so for the type of data that you are now using. The requirements for institutional review are set nationally and may vary significantly from one country to another. You may find these ethical reviews of research are called something else at your university or in your country. Typically, the goal of most review boards is to run a cost-benefit analysis of biomedical and human subject research and determine if the benefits of the proposed study outweigh the risks to the participants (OHRP, 2020).

Having an IRB approved study does not mean you have an inherently ethical design to your study, just that the review board saw that the benefits outweighed any possible or actual harms. While most guidelines for ethics review were developed for medical and pharmaceutical research, it is important to consider the impact of all human subject studies. It may seem that the harms discussed are disproportionate to the risk in your own work, but even small social studies can impact their subjects in ways that were not foreseen. The included Powerpoint, created by Dr. Bridget Blodgett, will walk through the major parts of an IRB application, using US universities as a template. It focuses on areas where you need to consider your answers carefully and how to approach automated data collection in a way that is cognizant of the human subject’s rights and the processes you may be using.

Following the review of these materials, complete the Discussion 5: Best Practices assignment.

Works Cited

The Office of Human Research Protection. “Chapter 3, Section A: Risk/Benefit Analysis.” Institutional Review Board Guidebook. pp. 1-10