Percent of MTurk Workers report feeling "emotionally traumatised" by academic surveys.
Thousand unique participants on Prolific
About
Establishing and improving standards in online behavioural research.
Behavioural science has come to rely heavily on crowdsourcing data online, often using crowdsourcing platforms like Prolific or Mechanical Turk. However, researchers vary in how they use crowdsourcing platforms, what expectations they have of these platforms, and what skills they think are needed for online research.
Lurking behind these practical issues is an unaddressed ethical problem: the field lacks unified ethical guidelines for crowdsourced research. Combined with the distance a browser puts between a researcher and their subjects, this means that behavioural scientists can unintentionally take a dehumanising attitude towards online participants.
This hackathon is organised around two key goals:
- Developing guidance for best practice in online research, aiming for practical, concrete, and accessible tips.
- Developing a code of conduct for researchers collecting data online.
These goals will lead to two key outputs, with shared authorship from all participants:
- A pre-print with detailed living online documentation, focused on shifting the burden for good quality online data from participants to researchers.
- A draft code of conduct for ethical online research, including an online portal for researchers to commit to following it, and display their commitment within their online experiments.
Join us in person in Padova, Italy, or online.
More information coming soon.
Resources
Coming soon: useful links and guidelines for ethical research online.
Organisers
Christine Cuskley
Centre for Behaviour and Evolution, Newcastle University