Ethical Research Protocols for Social Media Health Research

Adrian Benton, Glen Coppersmith, Mark Dredze


Abstract
Social media have transformed data-driven research in political science, the social sciences, health, and medicine. Since health research often touches on sensitive topics that relate to ethics of treatment and patient privacy, similar ethical considerations should be acknowledged when using social media data in health research. While much has been said regarding the ethical considerations of social media research, health research leads to an additional set of concerns. We provide practical suggestions in the form of guidelines for researchers working with social media data in health research. These guidelines can inform an IRB proposal for researchers new to social media health research.
Anthology ID:
W17-1612
Volume:
Proceedings of the First ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Dirk Hovy, Shannon Spruit, Margaret Mitchell, Emily M. Bender, Michael Strube, Hanna Wallach
Venue:
EthNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
94–102
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-1612
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-1612
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Adrian Benton, Glen Coppersmith, and Mark Dredze. 2017. Ethical Research Protocols for Social Media Health Research. In Proceedings of the First ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing, pages 94–102, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Ethical Research Protocols for Social Media Health Research (Benton et al., EthNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-1612.pdf