Ethics of Empirical Research
Date
2020-09-08Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Media psychologists need to reflect on what is considered ethical research in an
increasingly complex digital media and sociocultural landscape by asking questions about whose
interests are served through research and the purposes that research is used for. Ethical values
such as truth, equity, justice, and inclusion should govern all aspects of research topics,
questions, methods, participants, instrumentation, data collection, analysis, and distribution.
Ethical principles are influenced by procedural ethics, professional codes, and personal
aspirational ethics. Ethical considerations for media psychologists range through informed
consent, minimizing psychological harm, increasing social responsibility of researchers, greater
benefit to communities that are researched, privacy and confidentiality, and authorship and
citational practices. Ethical considerations relating to experimental research, computational
analytics, Internet-based data, social media data, and biophysiological data are discussed in this
entry.