jimi adams

jimi adams

Professor of Sociology

ethics in networks research

Published:

New resource - article and accompanying site that I contributed to. The site includes an executive summary intended for sharing with IRBs for facilitating networks research.

I’m super excited to have this out. The team was great to work with!

Now a bit of (self-indulgent?) back story. In my little green book’s section on ethics, I mused that maybe someday, someone could help consolidate the seeming wild west of ethical approaches to network research that exist in the field.

“…given the highly multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of social networks research, it is unclear which organization(s) would take the lead in that charge. Perhaps the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) and the Network Science Society could support a joint effort toward the development of such standards. However, the members of those two organizations come from many dis- ciplines, which may make that aim especially difficult; the ethical codes already present across those varied disciplinary professional associa- tions may not be easily aligned under a single umbrella. This leaves as an open question how viable it may be to arrive at a single code of ethics for social network researchers…”

When I joined the INSNA board, I inquired about them doing so. The response was essentially “that sounds great; wanna organize?” Whoops.

So a few years ago, I started sending out requests to folks I thought would be important to be involved and might be interested. After a few iterations a team assembled and we started pulling things together.

One of our resolute aims was to distill what’s out there, not to create new standards, and hopefully in doing so, to provide a central resource to help smooth the process for researchers dealing with IRBs who just don’t have a mental map for how to deal with the needs of social network research.

As we neared being able to pull things into an actual paper, I hit a personal/professional wall, and the project stalled because of me for a while (sorry team!). Eventually I had the wherewithal to ask others on the team to take the lead and see it through. And did they ever! Francisca Ortiz Ruiz , José Luis Molina, & Paola Tubaro in particular took the lead, clarified the work the team had already done, got it into a coherent form, turned it all into an actual paper rather than a collection of ideas, and pushed things over the line. I’m so happy they did so!

As with the initial intent, we hope this is a useful resource for people who are trying to get network research done.

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Published:

A couple of weeks ago, a recent paper w/ Nicholas Landry appeared in PLoS One.

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