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130 PART II: Descriptive Methodstopics were common to that forum, and that the researchers had appropriatelyestablished safeguards to protect respondents’ identities (e.g., by separatingnames or pseudonyms from comments). On the other hand, there are instancesin which people have felt their privacy was violated when they learned that researchersobserved their online discussions without their knowledge (see Skitka& Sargis, 2005). Although Internet message boards may be considered “public,”researchers investigating adolescent messages about self-injurious behaviorswere required by their university IRB to paraphrase participants’ commentsrather than use exact quotes (Whitlock et al., 2006). Behavioral research usingthe Internet is in its early stages, and both researchers and IRB members are stilllearning and applying creative problem solving for ethical dilemmas as theyarise (see Kraut et al., 2004).When individuals are involved in situations that are deliberately arrangedby an investigator, as occurs in structured observation and field experiments,ethical problems associated with placing participants at risk may arise. Consider,for example, a field experiment in which students walking across campuswere questioned about their attitudes toward racial harassment (Blanchard,Crandall, Brigham, & Vaughn, 1994). In one condition of the experiment, a confederate,posing as a student, condemned racist acts and in a second condition,the confederate condoned racist acts. Individual participants were then askedabout their attitudes. The results of the study indicated that the views expressedby the confederate caused participants to be more likely to express similar statementscompared to a third condition, in which the confederate didn’t expressany opinion. We can ask, were these participants “at risk”? Did the goals of thestudy, which were to show how outspoken people can influence interracial socialsettings, outweigh any risks involved in the study? Although participantswere “debriefed immediately” in this study, is that sufficient to address anyconcerns about how they may have behaved when confronted with racist opinions?Did debriefing restore their confidence in a science that seeks knowledgethrough deception? Any attempt to answer these questions highlights the difficultyof ethical decision making.Finally, we can turn to unobtrusive measures such as physical traces andarchival data to address another ethical issue: scientists’ ethical obligation toimprove individual and societal conditions. There are many serious issuesthat confront us today, including violence, race relations, suicide, domesticconflict, and many other social issues, for which research involving directobservation may be difficult to justify when considering a risk/benefit ratio.That is, some research methods simply may involve too great a risk to researchparticipants. However, psychologists’ ethical obligation to improvethe conditions of individuals, organizations, and society requires that theyseek methods to gain knowledge in these important areas, for the cost of notdoing research to solve these problems is high. Research involving the useof physical traces and archival data can be carried out on these importantproblems under conditions where ethical issues are often minimal relative tomore intrusive methods. Thus, unobtrusive observational methods representan important tool in the multimethod approach for investigating importantsocial issues with less risk.