Ethical Considerations
Ethical issues were considered in the design and development of our research study.
According to Keyton (2011), there are six areas of ethical concern to consider in the process.
First, the study featured no intentional deception, as there was no need to mislead participants for this particular topic. There were also no confederates utilized in the study, and no possibility of physical or psychological harm to the respondents. The research study also did not use video or audio recording to acquire its responses. Two other areas of ethical concern, however confidentiality and anonymity, and debriefing of participants – were relevant to our research study and must be discussed.
Because the survey required no name to participate, the anonymity of respondents was protected. For those respondents who chose to take part in the content analysis, the researchers kept all information discovered in the process strictly confidential, between the researchers and the respondents. As the study dealt with users’ awareness of their settings and could uncover inconsistencies, the researchers debriefed their findings with each participant upon completion of the study so that they could gain a true awareness of their settings. The debriefing was conducted through a Facebook inbox message which detailed the findings of the content analysis and alerted users of their privacy settings awareness.