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Computational Thinking and Social Science | :copyright: Matti Nelimarkka | 2023 | Sage Publishing
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Chapter 11

Research ethics and computational social science


Learning goals

  • Point to key similarities and differences between the research ethics questions in computational social science domains and the traditional social sciences.
  • Describe the ethical practices that are relevant for your own work.
  • Identify the various ethics frameworks applicable to research that involves computational social science.
  • Describe the diversity of perspectives on research ethics across countries and disciplines.
  • Assess research projects from the standpoint of ethical concerns.

Ethics in theory

  • Ethics involves making normative judgements. These can be justified
    • stating that action has positive consequences (consequentialist ethics)
    • there are duties that require us to act (duty-based ethical approach, or deontology)
    • the behavioural virtues support certain behaviour (virtue ethics)

Ethics in theory

Why should I follow ethical principles?

  • Gross violations of research ethics could lead to censure, loss of funding or even unemployment.
  • People consider themselves a good person and strive to behave accordingly.
  • Helps to withstand the scrutiny and justify decisions to family and friends.
  • We are all in it together.

Research ethics in practice

  • Computational social science does not mean we need completely new perspective on ethics. Many things are already in place.
  • Research ethics is specific to cultural and disciplinary factors.
  • Ethics may be different in your home institution and in different archetypes of computational social sciences.

Research ethics in practice

(Add some slides on research ethics in your country or institution to ensure the lecture addresses local context.)

Potential learning activities: Exercise 11.2 and 11.3.


Research ethics in practice

  • Ethical principles: established national and international guidelines and regulations on dos and don'ts
  • Ethics question: help researchers to examine the situation and understand different concerns.

Learning activity

  • Group discussion: Exercise 11.4
  • Group discussion: Exercise 11.5

Subjects' views on their protection

  • What subjects expect may be different from scholarly practices on protecting them.

Research ethics and society

  • Legislation: terms of services and privacy regulation
  • Outputs of computational social science and their further use
  • Societal impact of the research and researchers' stances

Further dimensions of ethics in research

Ethics is more than how we protect human subjects' and limit the harm our research have for the society.

  • Integrity
  • Collegiality
  • Co-authoring and attribution
  • Access to data and institutional inequalities

Managing conflicting perspectives

  • Real-world ethics questions rarely have a clear and explicit answer – and where one does exist, the problems themselves are most likely trivial, with obvious solutions.
  • Research ethics requires sensitivity to ethical problems:
    1. Identify stakeholders.
    2. Recognize ethical issues for each stakeholder.

Ethical sensitivity tiers

  1. Focus only on factual claims about the subject, without examining the moral questions.
  2. Acknowledge the existence of risks but do not move beyond statements about their presence or nature to ramifications.
  3. Both acknowledge risks and incorporate moral considerations into one’s statements but either keep the considerations more fact centred or include strong but unqualified value judgements.
  4. Display mature consideration, with reflection on the conditions wherein particular levels of risks could be accepted.

Learning activity

  • Group discussion: Exercises 11.7 and 11.8.

Review questions

  1. What distinguishes consequentialist ethics, duty-based ethics, and virtue ethics?
  2. What is the difference between a principle-based approach and a question-oriented approach to research ethics?
  3. What should one consider if collecting PII from an online service?
  4. Beyond protection of human subjects, what ethical challenges should computational social scientists be concerned about?
  5. What are the four levels of ethical sensitivity?