Empirically Studying Research Ethics with Interface Designs for Debriefing Online Field Experiments

Abstract

Debriefing is an essential research ethics procedure in non-consented research wherein participants are informed about their participation in research and provided with controls over their data privacy. This paper presents a novel system for conducting and studying debriefing in large-scale behavioral experiments on online platforms. I designed a debriefing system, with an accompanying evaluation study, which are both delivered as a web application. I recruited 1182 users on Twitter who have been affected by DMCA takedown notices into an empirical study on debriefing. The key contributions of this paper are 1) the design and implementation of the debriefing system, 2) empirical findings from the debriefing study on its unexpectedly low response rate, and 3) an evidence-based analysis of challenges researchers face in recruiting participants for research ethics and data privacy research.