Ethics patches in a box

a clever, topical title

Author

blinded

Published

July 16, 2023

Overview

Description of course/setting

  • Actual: Statistical Analysis of Social Network Data
  • Generic: upper-level course that requires a second course in statistics, and preferably a programming course

NAS ethical areas

  • Privacy and confidentiality,
  • Responsible conduct of research,

Questions/goals addressed

  • Give students the experience of collecting social network data, and to experience how there are many subjective choices in the collection of those data.
  • Have students consider how abstraction (the way in which data are represented) strips context from the data, and talk about implications of that lack of context
  • Students apply general paper on ethics of survey data to the specific context of social network surveys: students create their own understanding of what makes social network data collection ethical.
  • This is meant for the first day of class, so the main goal is to set the tone for the class that ethics must be considered throughout.

Bloom taxonomy

  • Application: Students apply knowledge of data science ethics in real-world context

Generalizability

  • any collection of data on humans

Lesson plan for instructors

Student preparation required

  • no technical knowledge required
  • after class, read:
    • Hammer (2017)
    • Kolaczyk and Csárdi (2014) (Pages 1-10 and 13-18)

Activity description

Warm up: How are people connected to each other?

  • Networks are collections of inter-connected entities and in social networks those entities are people
  • working in small groups: brainstorm as many possible different social connections that you can think of
  • (after brainstorming is over) Have students share social connections they thought of and write them on the board

Time to collect data: Grey’s Anatomy

  • Introduce a TV show or movie in which many people interact with each other in different ways (I chose Grey’s Anatomy and got a DVD from the College Library)
  • Ask each student to pair up. In pairs: identify two kinds of social connections that you could collect from watching part of Grey’s Anatomy
  • Have students pick which kind of social connection information they will collect
  • Show part of the first episode of Grey’s Anatomy (I showed first 12 minutes) and have students collect the social network information

Questions to Ask in Data Collection Discussion:

  • What did you notice as you were collecting the data?
  • Was it always obvious that people were or were not connected?
  • How can biases be introduced when collecting social network data? What implications will that have for the conclusions we will make based on the data?
  • Assuming that you were a “fly on the wall” instead of watching a TV show, do you have any concerns for collecting these data?

Homework Portion

  • Read Hammer (2017) and reflect on the following questions:
    • How can you apply the ideas about data ethics from this reading (which is about surveys in general) to social network analysis survey collection? Which ideas carry over to the social network context, which do not?
    • Did collecting the Grey’s Anatomy data bring up ethical concerns? Why or why not?
  • Read Kolaczyk and Csárdi (2014) (Pages 1-10 and 13-18)
    • Summarize in your own words the three types of Network Analysis
    • Using Grey’s Anatomy data as an example: what are potential benefits/harms of conducting these kinds of analyses?
    • Use the social network data you collected from watching Grey’s Anatomy in class to create an adjaceny list, an edge list, an adjacency matrix. What are the advantages and disadvantages of representing your network data in each of these ways?
    • How does the way we represent data about people change how we consider the ethical implications that can be intwined in the collection and analysis of that data?

Deliverables

  • homework assignment
  • (optional): sets up class discussion for the next class period in which students dicuss their ideas from the reading

References

Fiesler, Casey, Natalie Garrett, and Nathan Beard. 2020. “What Do We Teach When We Teach Tech Ethics? A Syllabi Analysis.” In Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 289–95. https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366825.
Hammer, Marilyn J. 2017. “Ethical Considerations for Data Collection Using Surveys.” In Oncology Nursing Forum. Vol. 44. 2.
Kolaczyk, Eric D, and Gábor Csárdi. 2014. Statistical Analysis of Network Data with r. Vol. 65. Springer.