Psychological Research Online: Report of Board of Scientific Affairs' Advisory Group on the Conduct of Research on the Internet

Abstract

As the Internet has changed communication, commerce, and the distribution of information, so too it is changing psychological research. Psychologists can observe new or rare phenomena online and can do research on traditional psychological topics more efficiently, enabling them to expand the scale and scope of their research. Yet these opportunities entail risk both to research quality and to human subjects. Internet research is inherently no more risky than traditional observational, survey, or experimental methods. Yet the risks and safeguards against them will differ from those characterizing traditional research and will themselves change over time. This article describes some benefits and challenges of conducting psychological research via the Internet and offers recommendations to both researchers and institutional review boards for dealing with them. ((c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)

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Psychological Research Online
Report of Board of Scientific Affairs’ Advisory Group
on the Conduct of Research on the Internet
Robert Kraut Carnegie Mellon University
Judith Olson University of Michigan
Mahzarin Banaji Harvard University
Amy Bruckman Georgia Institute of Technology
Jeffrey Cohen Cornell University
Mick Couper University of Michigan
As the Internet has changed communication, commerce,
and the distribution of information, so too it is changing
psychological research. Psychologists can observe new or
rare phenomena online and can do research on traditional
psychological topics more efficiently, enabling them to
expand the scale and scope of their research. Yet these
opportunities entail risk both to research quality and to
human subjects. Internet research is inherently no more
risky than traditional observational, survey, or experimen-
tal methods. Yet the risks and safeguards against them will
differ from those characterizing traditional research and
will themselves change over time. This article describes
some benefits and challenges of conducting psychological
research via the Internet and offers recommendations to
both researchers and institutional review boards for deal-
ing with them.
The Internet and the widespread diffusion of personal
computing have the potential for unparalleled impact
on the conduct of psychological research, changing
the way psychologists collaborate, collect data, and dissem-
inate their results. In this article, we focus on the way the
Internet is changing the process of empirical research,
identifying both opportunities and challenges. The Internet
presents empirical researchers with tremendous opportuni-
ties. It lowers many of the costs of collecting data on
human behavior, allowing researchers, for example, to run
online experiments involving thousands of subjects with
minimal intervention on the part of experimenters (Nosek,
Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002b). Internet chat rooms and
bulletin boards provide a rich sample of human behavior
that can be mined for studies of communication (Galegher,
Sproull, & Kiesler, 1998), prejudice (Glaser, Dixit, &
Green, 2002), organizational behavior (Orlikowski, 2000),
or diffusion of innovation (Kraut, Rice, Cool, & Fish,
1998), among other topics. The Internet is also a crucible
for observing new social phenomena, such as the behavior
of very large social groups (Sproull & Faraj, 1995), dis-
tributed collaboration (Hinds & Kiesler, 2002), and identity
switching (Turkle, 1997). These phenomena are interesting
in their own right and have the potential to challenge
traditional theories of human behavior.
At the same time, the Internet raises concerns about
data quality and the treatment of research subjects. Re-
searchers often lose control over the context in which data
are procured when subjects participate in experiments on-
line. Ensuring informed consent, explaining instructions,
and conducting effective debriefings online may be more
difficult than in traditional laboratory settings. Observa-
tions in chat rooms and bulletin boards raise difficult ques-
tions about risks to subjects, including privacy and lack of
informed consent.
This article will discuss both the advantages and the
challenges associated with conducting psychological re-
search online. We think the problems in conducting re-
search online can be mastered, and we close with recom-
mendations directed toward both the researcher and the
institutional review boards (IRBs) that oversee the protec-
tion of human research subjects.
Opportunities of Internet Research
The Internet can have a positive impact on the conduct of
psychological research, both by changing the costs of data
collection and by making visible interesting psychological
phenomena that do not exist in traditional settings or are
difficult to study there.
Editor’s note. William C. Howell served as action editor for this article.
Author’s note. Robert Kraut, Human-Computer Interaction Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University; Judith Olson, School of Information, Uni-
versity of Michigan; Mahzarin Banaji, Department of Psychology, Har-
vard University; Amy Bruckman, College of Computing, Georgia Insti-
tute of Technology; Jeffrey Cohen, Weill Medical College, Cornell
University; Mick Couper, Institute for Social Research, University of
Michigan.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Rob-
ert Kraut, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh,
PA 15213. E-mail: robert.kraut@cmu.edu
105February/March 2004 ●American Psychologist
Copyright 2004 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/04/$12.00
Vol. 59, No. 2, 105–117 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.59.2.105
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