Social Psychology Special Issue

Reflective paper:
Ethical issues encountered in field study
collaborations with organisations outside
of academia
Tommy van Steen
In this reflective piece, I discuss the ethical issues academics and social psychologists can encounter when they
collaborate with organisations outside of academia. A recently published paper, the Facebook contagion study,
serves as an example to discuss issues such as informed consent, debriefing, and possible tensions between
academics and organisations regarding the goal of the data collection.
DURING MY UNDERGRADUATE
STUDIES, I heard a story about a
group of first-year students who were
designing a study as part of their coursework.
Their idea: throw a life-sized doll off the top
of a 20-storey building on campus and
measure the responses of bystanders, in this
case, students and staff members. Their
supervisor rejected this idea on ethical
grounds, which won’t surprise anyone, but an
interesting question is why will such a study
never receive ethical approval? Is it the risk of
physical injuries to the crowd; or the risk of
creating a traumatic experience? Researcher
safety, perhaps? Or is the lack of informed
consent the vital missing part in this idea?
Regardless of the importance of
informed consent, this is not always viable in
field studies. Consider a classic study by
Milgram, for example, who had a group of
confederates (group size ranging from one
to 15) standing still on the street, looking at
the top of a building to see how many
bystanders would follow their example
(Milgram, Bickman & Berkowitz, 1969). In
such setting, asking bystanders to sign an
informed consent form that explains the
goal and methods of the study is not feasible.
In lab studies, informed consent is easy to
obtain, as you can inform participants before
the study and debrief them afterwards in a
systematic manner. In natural experiments
or field studies where the sample is not
clearly defined before the data collection
starts (as was the case in the Milgram study)
obtaining consent is nearly impossible.
However, the choice not to ask for consent
before collecting data is one that is made
after discussing this with the researchers’
institutional ethics board. The researchers
can explain why they believe asking for
consent is not an option and the ethics
board can decide whether such a study is
acceptable and what precautions need to be
taken to ensure participants’ safety. This is all
relatively straightforward. The issues with
field studies arise when the project is run by
companies, or collaboratively between
companies and academics.
When academics conduct research, their
proposed methods, procedures, and possible
negative outcomes have been closely examined
by a research ethics committee, as
required by local national organisations such
as the British Psychological Society (BPS),
who provide guidelines on how to conduct
research in an ethical manner. In industry,
this is less common. Companies might have
their own ethics board, but no general
guidelines really exist and companies are not
obliged to adhere to any ethical guidelines
related to research.
26 PsyPAG Quarterly