The Future Place Blog

It’s time for market research to join 21st Century

There are a large number of discussions and consultations going on at the moment about initiatives from ESOMAR, CASRO, the MRS and others to try to regulate how social media research should be conducted, especially social media monitoring. The general thrust of the new guidelines is to try and fit the new world into the traditional values and ideas of market research. I think this is the wrong way to go about the change.

I think we need to change the whole of commercial market research to match the 21^st Century, rather than try to keep shoehorning the new world into the old constructs.

My feeling is that there will soon be a schism in market research, between those trying to hang onto the past and those embracing the new.

The benefits of traditional market research ethics were that they allowed some exemptions to laws (e.g. data protections laws, laws about multiple contacts, laws about phoning people who were on ‘no call’ lists), increased public trust, and allowed market research to get close to a scientific model – for example to use concepts such as random probability sampling and statistical significance. Complying with codes of ethics incurred extra costs, but they also brought commercial benefits. The ‘proper’ market research companies could do things the non-research companies could not- so there was a commercial argument in favour of self-regulation, codes of conduct, and professional conduct bodies.

However, in several areas, ‘new’ market research is at odds with the traditional guidelines. Examples of where NewMR is at odds with the traditional ethics includes: the brand-related incentives for members of communities, the brand advocacy of community members, the changes wrought by deliberative research, and most of social media monitoring research. Other areas where research is drifting away from the classic model of anonymity include a growing amount of customer satisfaction and most of enterprise feedback systems.

Traditional market research is based on a) anonymity and b) informed consent. Large parts of new market research cannot deliver anonymity and in the area of social media research (and behavioural data integration) informed consent cannot be reliably assumed either.

If market research companies abide by the old ethics, in particular anonymity and informed consent, they will not be able to compete for business in most areas where market research is growing. This is because there will be no commercial benefits that will accrue to sticking to rules and ideas that nobody else does. To stick to out-dated rules simply provides a worse service for clients. Rules have costs, they only work when they also confer benefits.

The view of people like the UK’s MRS is that all of the ‘stuff’ that does not match the traditional view of market research should be done as "NOT market research". The problem with this solution is that it will soon classify the majority of market research as "NOT market research" which is clearly nonsense.

My remedy is that commercial market research should be split from genuine social research (by social research I mean the stuff that is not done principally for commercial reasons, such as some of the research by Governments, academics, and NGOs). Social research should keep the traditional values of ethics and commercial market research should fully embrace the new world. The ethics of NewMR should be based on:

1) The law

2) Not doing things likely to outrage the public

3) Creating high standards (and that can include charter marks and ISOs for those interested)

4) Emphasising the need to be open and honest

Note the case for charter marks and ISOs should not be based on theoretical arguments, but simply on whether they confer commercial benefits. If signing up to an ISO means that market research companies are able to win more work, then the ISO is s a good thing. If the ISO simply makes the industry feel better about itself, the ISO is a bad thing.

These four principles would, for example, mean that if a company told respondents that the study was anonymous and that they would not be contacted, then it would have to be anonymous and there would have to be no follow-up contact – that would be the law in many countries (because a contract has been entered into) and failing to stick to a promise would outrage the public.

Similarly, the four principles would outlaw using a false identity to access a closed community (for example PatientsLikeMe) and surreptitiously scraping comments to be sold to a third party – i.e. the Nielsen scrape-gate case. I suspect that not only would this outrage the public and damage the value of the company, but it could easily fall foul of civil suits, where members of the community could sue for damages.

This model of market research ethics changes the balance of who determines what can and should be done. In the traditional market research model the rules were set by the wise market researchers, to protect respondents and brands. My suggestion is that respondents should determine what can and should be done with their data, and that citizens should set the framework.

What do you think?

 

The role of regulation and legislation in the context of market research

There has been some excited chatter on Twitter recently over the issue of regulation, guidelines, ethics, and legislation (well to be accurate, I was the one who added legislation to the mix by posing the question whether ethical/responsible market researchers should be pressing for legislation rather than self-regulation in some cases). This post is intended to clarify my position and hopefully spark a wider debate on the topic.

I think there are basically three elements in a regulatory context, from guidelines, to self-regulation, to official regulation.

Why have guidelines?

Guidelines tend to have two functions, the first is inward looking, to provide guidance as to what constitutes good practice (ranging from best practice to minimum criteria), the second function is outward looking, telling others what to expect from people who follow the guidelines.

In terms of market research a good example of a guideline is the list of 26 questions about an online panel published by ESOMAR, these are suggested questions that a buyer of research might want to ask a supplier, and they imply that providers should have suitable answers. Buyers do not have to ask these questions, vendors do not have to have answers to them.

Guidelines are often unpopular with the public, legislators, and buyers as they tend not to offer any redress for services that do not meet the guidelines and they tend to leave all the responsibility with the buyer (i.e. caveat emptor – buyer beware). Guidelines can also be unpopular with vendors as those vendors who follow them can find that their costs are higher, but that the buyers are not able assess the extra value). In most markets, most of the time, ethical companies are at a commercial disadvantage to unethical competitors – the big companies did not get big by being nicer than other people.

Guidelines tend to work best when the vendors tend to know them, to stick to them, and where the buyers are knowledgeable and are able to assess the product or service.

Guidelines can also be really useful when they are helping organisations understand a new field. Back in the mid-nineties the emergent guidelines from organisations like ESOMAR helped market researchers understand the issues that online research was creating and provided guidance on how issues such as cookies should be assessed. Regulation would have been impossible as the field was changing too fast, but some generalised guidelines were helpful.

Self-Regulation?

Self-regulation tends to spring from three key sources:

1)      To avoid external regulation, for example by legislation.

2)      To protect quality vendors from unfair competition.

3)      To gain specific benefits, for example exemptions.

In many cases organisations feel that self-regulation is preferable to external legislation because it is likely to be less expensive and more informed. However, when the public are polled they usually prefer external regulation as they feel that self-regulation usually favours companies over them and that the sanctions tend to be too weak.

In terms of protecting quality vendors from unfair competition the key issue tends to be where it is hard for the buyer to assess whether a product is inferior or not. In this context, quality vendors tend to band together to keep each other from dropping their standards. Two examples of this process are the call-backs that used to operate with face-to-face research, and the age rules for interviewing children.

In the days of face-to-face interviewing there was a perceived need to check to see if interviews were genuine, had the right people been interviewed, had the interviewer just filled in the forms at home? So, in many markets a call-back system was put in place where a percentage of the people who had been interviewed were called to check that the interview had really taken place. This process added to the cost of the surveys and organisations wanted to ensure that everybody who claimed to be a quality provider was doing at least the minimum specified number of call backs. The sanction for companies that cheated was that they could be thrown out of the system, and most buyers at that time felt the quality system was worth paying extra for.

In terms of interviewing children, the market research bodies have established rules about asking for parental permission before interviewing children, this was done for ethical reasons and in most cases were much strict than the law required. Having agreed these rules it was then important for the market research organisations to stick to these rules, otherwise companies that broke the rules would have a commercial advantage, particularly as some buyers of research made it clear they did not like the rules and would seek to get round them.

The thirds reason for self-regulation is the attempt to gain exemptions. In several countries market research organisations are able to do things that most other companies can’t do, for example ringing people without permission, holding data for longer than six months, and linking data together. These exemptions have been negotiated by the national and international research bodies with governments, in return for ‘guaranteeing’ certain practices, such as keeping respondents anonymous. One source of tension in international discussions about regulation is that the benefits vary greatly by country. In Germany, for example, the benefits given to market research institutes are considerable, so German researchers often call, quite rationally, for better self-regulation.

Self-regulation relies on two key criteria

1)      Sanctions that act as a deterrent

2)      That most organisation are inside the system

My feeling is that market research is moving out of the self-regulation era because too small a proportion of the total amount of research is conducted by market research companies, creating major economic advantages to organisations that are not bound by the regulations.

I should also mention another reason for self-regulation, one much less-high minded than the three mentioned above, restriction of trade. Since the times of the Roman Empire and probably before there have been guilds who have sought to create rules to keep competitors out, from the makers of urns in Pompeii to today’s restrictive practices in getting taxi permits in some of the world’s leading cities the aim as not been to raise standards, but simply to limit competition. In terms of market research this issue is one that has impacted the discussion of ISOs and the FTO. Are ISOs about improving standards and avoiding unfair competition or are they about raising barriers to entry that favour those creating the standards? Is the FTO about increasing transparency and avoiding unfair competition from countries whose standards are lower, or does it have the whiff of protectionism, nationalism or worse?

External Regulation

External regulation tends to be a combination of action by legislators and the courts. It is not unusual in business for activities to go from legal, to dispreferred, to illegal over a period of time. For example, insider trading used to be common, then it became against the guidelines, then it became against the self-regulatory rules, and now is illegal and has resulted in some very long prison sentences.  We can’t simply say “crime is crime, and ethics are ethics” because it is the legislative process that decides that something is or is not legal.

The picture of what is and is not regulated is highly varied, both internationally and locally. For example, Florida will not allow you to trade as an interior decorator without a four year degree and two year apprenticeship (the Economist), and the net of legislation is getting ever closer to market research.

In most countries data protection legislation impacts on what market researchers can and can’t do, as do distance selling directives, child protection laws, and court cases about the adequacy of market research predictions.

My views on where these elements should go next

So, what do I think should happen over the next few years? Well, I think that self-regulation is largely busted, the sanctions are too weak and too many companies are not subject to them. For example, in the area of social media monitoring I would estimate that organisation subscribing to market research guidelines account for perhaps 10% of all research.

I think that leaves market research with a combination of guidelines and external regulation (in practice what I mean is legislation for the external regulation bit).

I would like ESOMAR, CASRO, etc to shift their focus to establishing best practice guidelines, as opposed to minimum standards, with an agenda of educating researchers, buyers, legislators, and the public. I am also a fan of specific qualifications and of professional development mechanisms (quick declaration of interest, I earn some of my living from both of these).

Beyond these guidelines, if there are things that we think market researchers SHOULD do, we should seek legislation, self-regulation will simply help the unethical out-compete the ethical.

The following is my list of legislation that I would like (if I ruled the world), but your list might be different.

1)      Separate research into ethical and commercial research. Ethical research would need to seek ethical approval from a recognised/license body (in way that academic research already has to). Commercial research would need to conform to general safety laws (i.e. not be dangerous, illegal etc) and be based on informed consent. Under this split, most social research would be done under the ethical code, most of the other research would then be commercial and market research companies could compete with non-research companies fairly.

2)      Ban all commercial activities targeted at children (with each country defining what it meant by children), this would include marketing, advertising, market research etc,

3)      Create a legal duty for vendors to explain the trustworthiness of any information or advice they sell. This would not apply just to market research, but would include market research along with other information and advice services. Companies would be free to illustrate the provenance of their information by citing industry guidelines, academic studies, philosophical traditions (for example Foucauldian Discourse analysis might  cite post-modern and post-structuralist sources, whereas a somebody selling a set of cross-tabs might cite the CASRO guidelines). This duty could be tested in court if a client felt they had been miss-sold.

4)      Create a duty of care for anybody about whom an organisation holds data. For example, if an organisation creates a community, they would have a responsibility for trying to avoid harm to those people, and if they mine personal information they should seek to avoid causing harm. A duty of care goes beyond informed consent, but falls well short of being responsible for their safety – it basically means that if companies are reckless AND something bad happens then they could be liable in court.

5)      Some legal guidance on what comments are public, what are private, and how public comments can be used. This is needed to create clarity, a level playing field, and to help split research from stalking, and a right to privacy from a reasonable right to know.  

6)      Some legal guidance on whose laws apply where. This is becoming a major problem for business in general, not just market research, with most legislators not understanding that the internet has changed things. We can’t have anarchy, but we also can’t have multiple governments closing their eyes to the new facts and passing laws which they imagine work but in reality fail.

I need to note that one consequence of my wish list, if in some parallel universe it came to pass, is that market researchers would lose many of their current exemptions, which would hurt some organisations, exspecially those in countries like Germany who have adapted their business practices to match the laws of the the country and to benefit from only doing 'real market research', but I think that change is inevitable, so let's try ot have it on our terms.

I certainly would not want legislation to define what market research is, nor how it should be used. Indeed, I do not think the research bodies can move fast enough these days to define it, and I think that attempts like ISO to define a specific practice are doomed to failure; at best they will define how we used to do things.

I know some people will shudder at the idea of legislation rather than self-regulation or guidelines, but consider that without legislation we would still have: insider trading, untrained doctors, self-taught drivers, and untrained teachers. What I want are fewer rules and regulations, but for those rules and regulations we do have to be enforceable and enforced.

 

I am sure that not everybody will agree with my analysis or my suggestions, so I would love to hear your comments.

Ethics and Social Media Research

Many thanks to the people who have commented on my posts about MROCs, Community Panels, and other communities. My work on the article I am writing has now moved specifically to ethics and I want to share my views on the current situation.

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Ethics and Social Media Research

Social media research has created a new range of problems for market researchers to grapple with, some of the problems relate to traditional issues but in a new context, other challenges are new and particular to social media. The key issues that social media research raises are:

1. Informed consent.
2. Anonymity.
3. The conflation of market research and marketing.
4. The trustworthiness of the findings.

Informed consent

The term ‘informed consent’ has been used by researchers for over fifty years, and for most of that time its meaning has been fairly clear, but now times have changed, challenging both the definition of ‘informed’ and ‘consent’, and of course the combination of the two.

In terms of social media monitoring, researchers have to consider whether they have the authors’ consent to read posts and comments, and if they do have consent, are the author’s necessarily informed about what they have consented to? The potential risk to the reputation of market research was well illustrated by the Nielsen and PatientsLikeMe case. Back in 2010, PatientsLikeMe, an online community where members share stories and personal experiences, discovered that somebody was ‘scraping’ information from their site. PatientsLikeMe investigated it and found that Nielsen were scraping private discussions to provide social media monitoring information for their clients. The news broke in the form of a Wall Street Journal article exposing and criticising Nielsen and quoting a community member who said they “felt totally violated”. Nielsen rapidly realised they had crossed the line, apologised, and promised never to repeat the mistake, but the image of market research in general and Nielsen in particular will take a long time to recover.

Within the context of communities and panels the trend is towards integrating a wide range of data, including images from smartphonea, tracking web browsing, and monitoring social media usage. This process has tended to be preceded by consent, but questions have been asked about whether it is ‘informed’ consent, are the participants truly aware of the sorts of information they are passively sharing? For example, in January 2011 TNS Gallup in Denmark withdrew its Webprofil product that tracked community members; although the members had consented, it transpired that many of them had not understood the implications.

Anonymity

Traditional market research is based on an assumption that the respondent remains anonymous; however social media research challenges that principle. In communities there is a risk that the anonymity of participants will be compromised, in terms of researchers, clients, and each other; and the risk grows over time, especially if participants are allowed to use photos of themselves as their avatars.

Social media monitoring tools are often capable of reporting who is saying what, and identifying those people across different strands of social media. This is really useful to marketers, but is in direct contravention of market research traditions. Another problem arises with the use of literal quotes mined from social media monitoring. If a literal quote is reported to the client it will often be possible for the client to identify the respondent who made the comment by using a search engine or community search function.

The conflation of market research and marketing

Social media research tends to blur the distinction between marketing and market research. One of the by-products of people being a member of a well-run branded, private community is that they tend to become brand advocates, leading to increased consumption of the brand’s services/products, and to positive word of mouth, which again is against the traditional views of market research that the process should not, itself, change the market.

In terms of social media monitoring, many of the tools give the end-client the chance to drill down to specific comments and individuals. This is part of what these tools were designed to do, but it is at odds with the traditional rules of market research.

The trustworthiness of findings from social media research

Traditional quantitative research, with assumptions of random probability sampling, has well established methods of assessing its reliability and validity. The methods of assessing the reliability and validity of qualitative research are less precise, but again are well established. By contrast, the reliability and validity of social media research, especially social media monitoring, do not benefit from any established methods of assessing their trustworthiness. At the NewMR Listening is the New Asking event Annie Pettit showed how sampling from different media produced different results, as did subtle differences in the terms searched for.

For the time being researchers utilising social media research need to ensure that the client is aware of what inferences they should draw from the research.

Where next for social media research and ethics?

The major trade bodies, for example CASRO, ESOMAR, MRA/IMRO etc are all working on new guidelines, or have recently published new guidelines, in an attempt to bring social media research into the broader structure of market research. However, it is unlikely that most of the successful implementations of social media research will be able to meet the requirements of: anonymity, scientific criteria of reliability, or any clear separation from marketing, something that will either result in the rules being changed or a large part of social media research being conducted outside of the regulations and guidelines of the trade bodies, perhaps by it being conducted outside of what is recognised as market research.

 

‘Should’ webinars be free?

Today we held a really successful online event looking at gaming and MR, the recordings and slides will be available next week at NewMR.org. We had eight presentations, about 100 attendees, lots of discussion and a real buzz on Twitter (check #newmr).

At the end of the webinar there was a brief (six question) survey asking for feedback. 70% of the attendees seemed reasonably satisfied with the event, and 88% thought it very or quite likely they would attend a similar future event. I wanted to assess people’s views as I would like to develop a model where I can provide a growing number of these events, but as a sole trader I need to do them without going bust!

In my opinion, the most interesting question related to asking whether what the charge for a future Webinar might reasonably be. The question asked was “This event was paid for by The Future Place, what would be a reasonable charge for future, similar events?”. The options and results were:

    32%    $10

     5%    $15

    11%    $20

    14%    $25

    39%    Nothing, they should be free

My interest was piqued by the fact that about four-in-ten thought that the webinars ‘should’ be free. One of the disappointments with quant data is not understanding why people score things the way they do. It seems to me there are a number of different possible reasons why people thing they ‘should’ be free, including:

1. They should be free because they do not cost anything.
2. They should be free because they are not worth money.
3. They should be free because they are done as a business promotion.
4. They should be free because they should be paid for by sponsors.
5. They should be free because they should be paid for by advertising.

However, all of the above seem, to some extent, to be flawed to me.

1)      They do cost money. I would estimate my out-of-pocket expenses at somewhere in the range $1000-$2000 for this event, including costs for admin), cost of webinar system, cost of online storage for the recordings, etc. As an example of the admin costs, there were eight speakers, each one required about one hour of rehearsal/recording time and the final recordings will take about six hours of work to produce versions to store on the internet.

2)      Whether they are worth the money (e.g. $10) is a matter of opinion, but if they are worth attending for three hours it would seem odd if they were not worth $10.

3)      Many webinars are done as a sales promotion and the case for these being free is strong. However, this webinar, and the ones I’d like to run are only tangently of benefit to my business. I am pretty much booked for the rest of the year so they take time but are unlikely to increase my revenue and they will cost money and take time.

4)      It might well be possible to find sponsors to pay for the costs of the webinars (in fact I suspect it would be straightforward). However, the protestant in me rebels at this idea, surely it is wrong for people to get something for nothing, just because somebody else would be willing to pay, isn’t that almost the definition of a freeloader?

5)      I suspect we could easily pay for the costs of running webinars by allowing advertisers to have short slots, perhaps between each speaker. This does not offend my sensibilities since people are paying for it in the sense of having to put up with the advertising – but I am not drawn to the idea.

So, I will have a think about a range of financial models to see if I can think of a way where more events can be organised. At the moment the options I have thought of include:

• Find a sponsor for the events and ignore my views about freeloaders (particularly since I might equally be a freeloader in such a model).
• Run the events for free but charge for the recordings and slides.
• Charge for the events and ignore the half of the industry who does not want to pay (if my poll is vaguely indicative).
• Ask for voluntary payments, perhaps listing those people who have paid.
• Only running events where I have a reasonable chance of advancing my business interests and limiting the number of events to my budget.

However, it is worth noting that charging introduces its own problems, including accounting, differential taxes (for example accounting for VAT), liability if things go wrong etc. There is also a negative link between charging and sponsorship money. Sponsors would like as many people as possible to attend and this is best achieved by making the event free.

What are your thoughts and suggestions?

 

How many messages is too many in cyberspace?

Over the past week we have been sending out quite a few messages on several different social media channels to help create and support the interest in the Festival of NewMR. One thing that has worried us is the balance between making sure the message gets out there on the one hand and annoying people on the other.

Today I have had nine interesting messages that relate to this question. I have received two messages from people who think they have received too many messages, one of whom has already bought a ticket to attend and is planning to take part in one of the activities on the website. Which suggests there might have been too many messages.

On the other hand, I have had five messages today from people thanking me for reminding them about the Festival, or for highlighting some specific aspect, such as the Research Liberation Front page in the Fringe.

And finally, there were two messages from people who were thanking for telling them about the Festival, because they had not heard about it before today/yesterday’s message.

So, how many messages is too many?

I suspect part of the problem is due to the scale-free nature of social networks. If I send out some form of message so that it reaches everybody who has asked to be in contact with me, across a range of social networks and channels, then people who connected to me in many ways are likely to receive that message many times. I suspect the ratio may even be ten-to-one, i.e. if the occasional contact is reached once, the close contact is reached ten times. And, the real challenge is that it is probably more important to reach the distant nodes in a network than the closer nodes (sorry, by nodes I mean people, but in the context of being in networks), as the more distant people are have fewer shared knowledge pools.

So, if you are one of my closer contacts, please accept my apologies. I will try harder not to bombard you, whilst not at the same time leaving the rest of the network in the dark.

So, to come back to the question in the title, how many messages is too many? How should one reach one’s network with a message that might be of interest to them without bombarding the close contacts? What is the right balance between receivers filtering what they receive and senders holding back on what they send?

Should we conduct commercial market research with children?

Research-Live today reports that there is a new collaboration in the UK between advertisers, marketers, and market researchers to draw up a code of conduct for marketing to children - a response to the Government threatening a 'crackdown' on irresponsible activities.

However, I believe that the new plans and the new MRS proposed code of conduct do not go far enough. Here is a copy of the comments I have added to the Research-Live article. 

"Speaking as a parent I find the proposed/draft MRS code much too soft, too much in favour of clients and too little in favour of families or specifically children.

Amongst my beefs are:

a) it permits research in school. This is not why we send our children to school. The rules say parental permission 'may' be asked, but teacher or head is allowed. No way! (I am happy for some social research to be conducted in schools, but not commercial research).

b) it allows a researcher who discovers a child in harm (for example being molested) to report it under some circumstances. No way! It should be a duty to ensure that either the police or social services are alerted, not an option that the researcher may choose if they wish.

c) I believe that any research that facilitates the marketing of products at children should be ruled by the code as unethical. Do we really want MR to be associated with trying to get children to eat more junk, drink more junk, or to pester parents into buying things that might not be affordable?

Let us hope that it will not be too much longer before the government bans the marketing of products at children altogether, but until then we should recognise that helping this kind of marketing is not ethical. I think we need to think like parents, not like businesspeople on this occasion."

What do you think?

Social Media and Ethics

Whilst at the recent ESOMAR Congress in Athens I created a vignette in my mind to help explain the many issues that can arise. Consider the following hypothetical example:

In Facebook I discover the “ACME TV and Video” page which has a wide variety of posts on it from people who use or like or are interested in ACME TVs and ACME videos. Because I do not want to keep visiting the site I create a script in my favourite web scraper to log in every day and to collect all new posts and to put them in a database for me. 

For my client, a major electronics company based in the US, I produce a report, based on social media, looking at the different social contexts of the consumers home electronics. I note within this ACME page a 200 word poem written by a member of the page who writes about how her neighbour’s 8 year old daughter is often left at home on her own and uses the TV to feel less alone and lonely.

In my report I include a copy of the poem and I mention that it is taken from the ACME TV page. However, in order to protect the 'respondent anonymity', I change her name to some fictitious name.

So, what’s wrong with any of that? Well let’s count some of the ways that come readily to mind as potential problems.

1. By using a web scraper to collect data from Facebook I have broken the terms and conditions of my use of Facebook.
2. By using material for Facebook for my commercial research I may have further broken the terms and condition that I signed up to when I joined Facebook.
3. If the person I collected the data from was under 16 (according to the UK MRS rules) then I have collected data from a child without prior parental permission.
4. By not quoting the author of the post I have broken many conventions about properly citing and crediting sources.
5. By quoting the poem in its entirety, without permission and without citing I may have breached copyright issues.
6. By using a literal quote I may have made it possible for the author to be identified. Because I have named the group the client could use a web scraper to load all recent posts and then search for the text in the report.
7. Not only may I have compromised the anonymity of the author, but if they post photos, if they have not protected their profile, I may have provided access to personal information such as mobile phone number.
8. Because I may have identified the author, I may also have identified the existence and identity a vulnerable child left alone.
9. Because the data is personally identifiable it falls under (in the UK) under the Data Protection Act, which means I need to hold it securely, and I can’t simply send it overseas to the US which has a different set of legal protections.

I am sure there are other problems that people can highlight, but I hope that the vignette will help illustrate that when we are working inside the area of social media we need to be very careful and we need to think about what we are doing.

In thinking about social media we need to think about: laws, terms and conditions, market research ethics, and other relevant codes, practices, and expectations. The general concept of informed consent will still provide a good guide, but we need to be clear about whose consent and how we ensure that it is informed consent.

The Tuskegee Experiment, the evolution of ethics, TARSK9

Formalised research ethics have not always been with us. At one time it was felt that ethical considerations could be left to experts and religions, without the need for regulation and legislation. Over the last hundred years this trust has all too often been shown to be misplaced, and high profile cases have shaped the research landscape we have today. This TARSK (things all researchers should know) covers one well known example.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment ran from 1932 to 1972 in Tuskagee, Alabama, USA. The research started by recruiting 339 poor African-American men who had syphilis in 1932 (at a time when there was not any effective treatment) and followed their progress over the next forty years to see how the disease developed if left untreated.

At the time the project started, in 1932, there is reason to believe that its aims were positive. For example, it seems the experiment was intended to highlight the need for treatment programmes. 

However, the shortcomings were numerous and appalling:

1.    The 339 men recruited were not told they had syphilis and consequently went on to infect many of their wives, which resulted in 19 of their children being born with congenital syphilis.

2.    By 1947 penicillin had become the standard and effective treatment for syphilis, however many of the men were not treated, nor told of their disease and the options to end it.

3.    Some of the men who were aware of penicillin were given placebos to enable their progress to be recorded.

4.    After the Second World War, and the medical abuses associated with the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Code was adopted to protect research subjects, but nobody involved with this experiment or overseeing it (for example the CDC) seems to have made the connection that these new rules covered them.

Although the experiment was never ‘secret’, for example, plenty of papers were published, the public in general were not aware of it. The story was eventually leaked to the press by Peter Buxton, who had spent several years trying to get the programme closed down through the official channels (for example, in 1966 the Government’s CDC confirmed the need to continue the study until all the men were dead and had been autopsied). The story was carried by the Washington Start in July 1972 and the experiment was closed the same year.

In 1976 the historian James Jones interviewed John Heller, who had been the Director of the Venereal Disease unit of the PHS from 1943 to 1948, amongst Heller’s remarks were “The men's status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical material, not sick people.”

In 1974 the US Government passed the National Research Act and the creation of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research helping ensure that such things could not happen in the future.

Research conducted in 1990 by Southern Christian Leadership Conference among African American churchgoers found that 34% thought AIDS was an artificial virus, 35% thought it a form of genocide, and 44% thought the Government were not telling the truth about AIDS. Many commentators have linked these beliefs to the loss of confidence created by the Tuskegee experiment.

Will the pressure on BP lead to justice for all?

There is enormous pressure on BP to pay full compensation for the environmental and economic devastation being caused in and around the Gulf of Mexico by its oil spill, and of course to make whatever amends it can for the eleven lives that were lost, and the seventeen who were injured, when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded. 

This is both right and fair.

However, wouldn’t it be a great outcome if as a result of this disaster the world grew up in terms of making businesses pay their dues when things go wrong. One particular example I have in mind is Bhopal disaster caused when Union Carbide’s factory in Bhopal, India exploded. Numbers vary, in terms of how many died at the time and since, but figures of 15,000 are commonly quoted. The explosion happened in 1984, but the land is still polluted, the groundwater is polluted, and babies are being born deformed, and people are still dying. There has been no full compensation in Bhopal, and there is still a need for Union Carbide and its parent Dow Chemicals to take full responsibility and to put right the environment and pay compensation to all those materially impacted by their explosion.

In India the court case looking into the deaths has just concluded and is widely seen as a whitewash. Seven former employees have been found guilty of causing death by negligence and sentenced to two years in jail and fines of about $2000.

Dow Chemicals, who bought Union Carbide in 2001, $10.3 billion, which means Union Carbide’s debts should now be Dow Chemicals debts. Dow Chemicals position is that the $470 million paid in compensation has fully met the obligations of the company. This is clearly outrageous.

So, let’s raise our voices on behalf of the people and the environment in the Gulf of Mexico, but let’s also demand justice for people less able to defend themselves in courts, starting with justice for the people of Bhopal.

If you use Facebook and would like to add your voice to others, you can join a page calling for justice here.

What is ethical market research?

At both the ESOMAR meeting in London on Wednesday and at the ASC conference on Thursday the related topics of quality and ethics were discussed several times. The growth in the use of online access panels (or convenience samples as I prefer to call them) and the events in the UK over the last couple of days relating to opinion polling and the General Election (check http://search.twitter.com/search?q=yougov) have made this a hot topic. (Last night 3 polls were published which had very different results, this has resulted in public ridicule  for MR).

This leads me to want to define my view of what I mean by both quality and ethics. 

The first point I would make is that quality is really just a sub-set of the ethics issue. What we mean by quality is, IMHO, defined by our position on ethics. Ethics says what we should do, quality is doing it well and at least doing it as well as we have said or implied we would do.

The second point is that we have to define market research in order to be able to define where and when the ethics apply and what they cover.

My definition of market research is that it is a business service providing information and advice to organisations about market related activities based on human beliefs, attitudes, actions, and intentions.

In my view this means market research does not include:

•    Academic research

•    Social research

•    Medical research

•    Geological and mineral surveys

•    Analysis of industrial processes

Many market researchers will also conduct academic, medical, and social research, but the ethics of those disciplines are different. For example, academic and social research can be conducted in ways that bring harm to the subjects, if the public good is large enough. Surprised? Check the US Federal law on Protection of Human Subjects, or think about the number of times that drugs trial cause bad effects, where the ethics simply require that the risk is minimised, that the subjects are properly informed, and that the potential benefit is big enough.

By contrast, in market research it is never acceptable for the design to knowingly risk harm to the subjects. The ‘good’ that market research generates is commercially for the client, hopefully our new collaborative research will also generate some general good as well, but it is hard to imagine the public good of a new brand of cheese is ever going to worth knowingly putting people at the risk of harm

So, what would I define as ethics? Well I have a pretty simple set of 3 points:

1. Say what you are doing. For example, if you are using a convenience sample and using modelling techniques to forecast the market, say so.
2. Do what you say you are doing. If you say you are using a technique based on the science of random probability sampling, then make sure you are.
3. The method you are using should be based on a recognised body of knowledge or thought and should be capable of being refuted or verified. For example, astrology and phrenology are not acceptable market research methods.

To give a real world example of what I think should happen is that when an online access panel is used the researcher should not use sampling error statistics as an implied measure of validity. They can be used as an indicator of reliability, that is fine, but not validity. I would like researchers to adopt a more engineering frame of mind and talk about experience and tolerances. For example, rather than saying science shows we can only be wrong 5% of the time, say “historically, based on X number of tests, we have only been wrong Y% of the time, so we feel confident is suggesting ….”. 

So, those are my thoughts and ethics, what is your view?