Research Ethics in Social Media Measurement: The good and the bad

Now that social media is being used for marketing and public relations purposes, well we have to know how to measure our successes and our failures. However, one question pops into my mind after reading up on research ethics for my Public Relations Research course: How do we accurately evaluate our research on social media without running into ethics conflicts?

One major problem with evaluating social media results is what our book called “respondent study risks.” In simpler terms this means, what if our respondents are not giving us true answers? What if respondents’ answers are lies, and what if they identify themselves as a demographic? That right there is one problem in the realm of ethics with social media. Some more interesting problems with measuring social media are discussed here.

However, not all is bad when questioning ethics within social media evaluation. One great advantage of working social media into your research is what our textbook refers to as “respondent recruitment.” Respondent recruitment is being able to get people to take part in whatever study you are doing. If you are conducting a study by using social media as a tool to do so, getting respondents is easier because you are reaching so many more people, and you are also allowing people the option to participate or ignore it. This works in favor of positive research ethics.

Because social media is so new, and even more new as a tool for marketing, research, public relations, and advertising, it has not been tweeked perfectly to provide accurate research information. As its use continues to grow these issues could possibly be fixed, allowing social media to become a more dependable research tool.