Beyond the Individual: A Community-Engaged Framework for Ethical Online Community Research

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zent, Matthew, Yong, Seraphina, Bala, Dhruv, Chancellor, Stevie, Konstan, Joseph A., Terveen, Loren, Yarosh, Svetlana
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zent, Matthew
Yong, Seraphina
Bala, Dhruv
Chancellor, Stevie
Konstan, Joseph A.
Terveen, Loren
Yarosh, Svetlana
author_facet Zent, Matthew
Yong, Seraphina
Bala, Dhruv
Chancellor, Stevie
Konstan, Joseph A.
Terveen, Loren
Yarosh, Svetlana
contents Online community research routinely poses minimal risk to individuals, but does the same hold true for online communities? In response to high-profile breaches of online community trust and increased debate in the social computing research community on the ethics of online community research, this paper investigates community-level harms and benefits of research. Through 9 participatory-inspired workshops with four critical online communities (Wikipedia, InTheRooms, CaringBridge, and r/AskHistorians) we found researchers should engage more directly with communities' primary purpose by rationalizing their methods and contributions in the context of community goals to equalize the beneficiaries of community research. To facilitate deeper alignment of these expectations, we present the FACTORS (Functions for Action with Communities: Teaching, Overseeing, Reciprocating, and Sustaining) framework for ethical online community research. Finally, we reflect on our findings by providing implications for researchers and online communities to identify and implement functions for navigating community-level harms and benefits.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_13752
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond the Individual: A Community-Engaged Framework for Ethical Online Community Research
Zent, Matthew
Yong, Seraphina
Bala, Dhruv
Chancellor, Stevie
Konstan, Joseph A.
Terveen, Loren
Yarosh, Svetlana
Human-Computer Interaction
Computers and Society
Social and Information Networks
Online community research routinely poses minimal risk to individuals, but does the same hold true for online communities? In response to high-profile breaches of online community trust and increased debate in the social computing research community on the ethics of online community research, this paper investigates community-level harms and benefits of research. Through 9 participatory-inspired workshops with four critical online communities (Wikipedia, InTheRooms, CaringBridge, and r/AskHistorians) we found researchers should engage more directly with communities' primary purpose by rationalizing their methods and contributions in the context of community goals to equalize the beneficiaries of community research. To facilitate deeper alignment of these expectations, we present the FACTORS (Functions for Action with Communities: Teaching, Overseeing, Reciprocating, and Sustaining) framework for ethical online community research. Finally, we reflect on our findings by providing implications for researchers and online communities to identify and implement functions for navigating community-level harms and benefits.
title Beyond the Individual: A Community-Engaged Framework for Ethical Online Community Research
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Computers and Society
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13752