Integrating technology in social science research: emerging trends and ethical considerations

• Autorzy: Romaniuk Miłosz W. , Gierzyński Jan , Pietrzak Magdalena , Zbróg Julia

Identyfikatory

DOI

10.24425/ijet.2025.153559

• Języki publikacji: EN

Abstrakty

EN

The paper is a result of a complementary advanced publication workshop accompanying the curriculum course exercises for PhD students, on the role of ICT in the research work of a scientist. This article examines the impact of digital technologies on social research, focusing on social media, open science, and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). It discusses the benefits and challenges of recruiting research participants through social media, open science practices, and the application of GenAI in academic research. It also presents ethical and methodological aspects of these technologies, emphasizing the need to update ethical guidelines. The article concludes with recommendations for the integration of digital technologies in research, with an emphasis on developing technological competences and maintaining scientific standards.

Słowa kluczowe

EN

ICT; social media; open science; generative AI; digital competencies

• Wydawca: Polish Academy of Sciences, Committee of Electronics and Telecommunication
• Czasopismo: International Journal of Electronics and Telecommunications
• Rocznik: 2025
• Tom: Vol. 71, No. 1
• Strony: 171--179
• Opis fizyczny: Bibliogr. 89 poz., tab.

Twórcy

autor

Romaniuk Miłosz W.

• The Maria Grzegorzewska University (APS), Warsaw

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1009-8940

autor

Gierzyński Jan

• The Maria Grzegorzewska University (APS), Warsaw

autor

Pietrzak Magdalena

• The Maria Grzegorzewska University (APS), Warsaw

autor

Zbróg Julia

• The Maria Grzegorzewska University (APS), Warsaw

Bibliografia

• [1] H. Macleod, B. Jelen, A. Prabhakar, L. Oehlberg, K. Siek and K. Connelly, "Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) for Researching Distributed Populations," in International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, 2016.
• [2] A. A. Owen-Smith, C. Woodyatt, R. C. Sineath, R. C. Sineath, E. M. Hunkeler, L. T. Barnwell, A. Graham, R. Stephenson and M. Goodman, "Perceptions of Barriers to and Facilitators of Participation in Health Research among Transgender People," Transgender Health, pp. 187-196, 2016.
• [3] J. Guillory, K. F. Wiant, M. Farrelly, I. Alam, L. Hoffman, E. Crankshaw, J. Delahanty, J. Delahanty and T. Alexander, "Recruiting hard-to-reach populations for survey research: Using Facebook and Instagram advertisements and in-person intercept in LGBT bars and nightclubs to recruit LGBT young adults," Journal of Medical Internet Research, 1 6 2018.
• [4] J. Russomanno, J. G. Patterson and J. M. Tree, "Social media recruitment of marginalized, hard-to-reach populations: Development of recruitment and monitoring guidelines," JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 2019.
• [5] E. M. Darko, M. Kleib and J. Olson, "Social Media Use for Research Participant Recruitment: Integrative Literature Review," Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2022.
• [6] A. Waling, A. Lyons, B. Alba, V. Minichiello, C. Barrett, M. Hughes and K. Fredriksen-Goldsen, "Recruiting stigmatised populations and managing negative commentary via social media: a case study of recruiting older LGBTI research participants in Australia," International Journal of Social Research Methodology, pp. 157-170, 2022.
• [7] Q. Oudat and T. Bakas, "Merits and Pitfalls of Social Media as a Platform for Recruitment of Study Participants," Journal of medical Internet research, 2023.
• [8] K. Jones, B. Wilson-Keates and S. Melrose, "Using social media to recruit research participants: a literature review," Nurse researcher, pp. 28-34, 2024.
• [9] H. Green, R. Fernandez and C. MacPhail, "Social media as a platform for recruitment to a national survey during the COVID-19 pandemic: Feasibility and cost analysis," JMIR Formative Research, 2021.
• [10] H. A. M. Voorveld, G. van Noort, D. G. Muntinga and F. Bronner, "Engagement with Social Media and Social Media," Journal of Advertising, pp. 38-54, 2018.
• [11] Datereportal, "Datereportal. Social Media Users," 10 2024. [Online]. Available: https://datareportal.com/social-media-users.
• [12] L. Wozney, K. Turner, B. Rose-Davis and P. J. McGrath, "Facebook ads to the rescue? Recruiting a hard to reach population into an Internet-based behavioral health intervention trial," Internet Interventions, 2019.
• [13] A. C. Bocar, "Difficulties Encountered by the Student-Researchers and the Effects on their Research Output," 2009.
• [14] M. Narui, K. A. Truong and T. L. McMickens, "Independent Study: How Three Doctoral Students Tackled Issues Recruiting Participants and Collecting Data with Historically Underrepresented Populations," Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, vol. 4, no. 1, 2018.
• [15] M. J. P. Dantic, I. F. Gonzales, M. E. Almero and A. L. Asuncion, "Challenges Experienced in Conducting Research in the New Normal: Education Student’s Perspectives," European Journal of Contemporary Education and E-Learning, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 31-43, 2024.
• [16] C. L. Booker, S. Harding and M. Benzeval, "A systematic review of the effect of retention methods in population-based cohort studies," BMC Public Health, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 249, 2011.
• [17] N. Sledzieski, T. D. Gallicano, S. Shaikh and S. Levens, "Optimizing Recruitment for Qualitative Research: A Comparison of Social Media, Emails, and Offline Methods," International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2023.
• [18] R. Jean Louis and L. M. Thompson, "Bots and fake participants: ensuring valid and reliable data collection using online participant recruitment methods," International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2024.
• [19] V. Kumarasamy, N. Goodfellow, E. M. Ferron and A. L. Wright, "Evaluating the Problem of Fraudulent Participants in Health Care Research: Multimethod Pilot Study," JMIR Formative Research, vol. 8, 2024.
• [20] J. Gierzyński, Psychospołeczne uwarunkowania doświadczania stresu mniejszościowego u osób transpłciowych i niebinarnych, 2023.
• [21] K. J. Zucker, "Epidemiology of gender dysphoria and transgender identity," Sexual Health, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 404-411, 2017.
• [22] H. Tajfel, "The achievement of inter-group differentiation. Differentiation between social groups," London: Academic Press, pp. 77-100, 1978.
• [23] H. Tajfel and J. Turner, "An integrative theory of inter-group conflict," in The social psychology of inter-group relations, Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1979, pp. 33-47.
• [24] G. Islam, "Social Identity Theory," in Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, T. Teo, Ed., Springer New York, 2014, pp. 1781-1783.
• [25] D. M. Frost and I. H. Meyer, "Measuring Community Connectedness among Diverse Sexual Minority Populations," The Journal of Sex Research, pp. 36-49, 2012.
• [26] J. E. Stets and K. McCaffree, "Linking Morality, Altruism, and Social Solidarity Using Identity Theory," in The Palgrave Handbook of Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity: Formulating a Field of Study, V. Jeffries, Ed., New York, Palgrave Macmillan US, 2014, pp. 333-351.
• [27] M. J. Greene, "On the Inside Looking In: Methodological Insights and Challenges in Conducting Qualitative Insider Research," The Qualitative Report, pp. 1-13, 2014.
• [28] K. Wentzell, H. R. Walker, A. S. Hughes and J. A. Vessey, "Engaging Social Media Influencers to Recruit Hard-to-Reach Populations," Nursing Research, pp. 455-461, 2021.
• [29] L. G. Johnston and K. Sabin, "Sampling Hard-to-Reach Populations with Respondent Driven Sampling," Methodological Innovations Online, pp. 38-48, 2010.
• [30] C. Wejnert and D. D. Heckathorn, "Web-based network sampling: Efficiency and efficacy of respondent-driven sampling for online research," Sociological Methods and Research, vol. 37, pp. 105-134, 2008.
• [31] P. Ferrer-Rosende, L. Esteve-Matalí, V. Stuardo-Ávila, M. Fuentes-Alburquenque and A. Navarro-Giné, "ScholarOne - Comparison between RDS and WebRDS for epidemiological and social studies," Authorea Preprints, 2024.
• [32] Z. Zindel, S. Kühne, L. De Vries, M. Kroh, D. Kasprowski, M. Fischer and D. Richter, "LGBielefeld 2021 Data Report: Online Survey on LGBTQI* People in Germany Second Wave," Bielefeld, 2023.
• [33] X. Wang and Z. Liu, "Online engagement in social media: A cross-cultural comparison," Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 97, pp. 137-150, 2019.
• [34] G. Hofstede, Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values, vol. 5, Sage, 1984.
• [35] M. De Choudhury, S. S. Sharma, T. Logar, W. Eekhout and R. C. Nielsen, "Gender and cross-cultural differences in social media disclosures of mental illness," in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW, 2017.
• [36] Freedomhouse, "Freedom on the Net (China)," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://freedomhouse.org/country/china/freedom-net/2024.
• [37] S. Dhawan, S. Hegelich, C. Sindermann and C. Montag, "Re-start social media, but how?," Telematics and Informatics Reports, vol. 8, 2022.
• [38] S. Shilina, "The future of social networking: Decentralization for user empowerment, privacy, and freedom from censorship," 2023.
• [39] J. Marx and M. Cheong, "Decentralised Social Media: Scoping Review and Future Research," ACIS 2023 Proceedings, 2023.
• [40] T. Huang, "Decentralized social networks and the future of free speech online," Computer Law and Security Review, vol. 55, 2024.
• [41] T. Lamonica, Peer-to-Peer Decentralized Social Media Platform Using Second-Layer Blockchain Technology, University of Ottawa, 2020.
• [42] M. Alizadeh, E. Hoes and F. Gilardi, "Tokenization of social media engagements increases the sharing of false (and other) news but penalization moderates it," Scientific Reports, p. 13703, 2023.
• [43] Z. Zhang, J. Zhao, G. Wang, S.-K. Johnston, G. Chalhoub, T. Ross, D. Liu, C. Tinsman, R. Zhao, M. Van Kleek and N. Shadbolt, "Trouble in Paradise? Understanding Mastodon Admin's Motivations, Experiences, and Challenges Running Decentralised Social Media," Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 1-24, 2024.
• [44] D. B. Resnik and M. Hosseini, "The ethics of using artificial intelligence in scientific research: new guidance needed for a new tool," AI and Ethics, 2024.
• [45] K. Macapagal, R. Coventry, M. R. Arbeit, C. B. Fisher and B. Mustanski, "“I Won’t Out Myself Just to Do a Survey”: Sexual and Gender Minority Adolescents’ Perspectives on the Risks and Benefits of Sex Research," Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 1393-1409, 2017.
• [46] J. A. Skorburg, K. O’Doherty and P. Friesen, "Persons or Data Points? Ethics, Artificial Intelligence, and the Participatory Turn in Mental Health Research," American Psychologist, 2024.
• [47] L. Besançon, N. Peiffer-Smadja, Segalas, Corentin, H. Jiang, P. Masuzzo, C. Smout, E. Billy, M. Deforet and C. Leyrat, "Open science saves lives: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic," BMC Medical Research Methodology, vol. 21, p. 117, 2021.
• [48] J. Ferguson, R. Littman, G. Christensen, E. L. Paluck, N. Swanson, Z. Wang, E. Miguel, D. Birke and J.-H. Pezzuto, "Survey of open science practices and attitudes in the social sciences," Nature Communications, vol. 14, p. 5401, 2023.
• [49] J. Lima de Magalhães, Z. Hartz, G. L. Jamil, H. Silveira and L. C. Jamil, Handbook of Research on Essential Information Approaches to Aiding Global Health in the One Health Context, IGI Global, 2022.
• [50] M. Watson, "When will ‘open science’ become simply ‘science’?," Genome Biology, vol. 16, p. 101, 2015.
• [51] T. Dienlin, N. Johannes, N. D. Bowman, P. K. Masur, S. Engesser, A. S. Kumpel, J. Lukito, L. M. Bier, R. Zhang, B. K. Johnson, R. Huskey, F. M. Schneider and J. Breuer, "An Agenda for Open Science in Communication," Journal of Communication, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 1-26, 2021.
• [52] M. Pownall, J. Terry, E. Collins, M. Sladekova and A. Jones, "UK Psychology PhD researchers’ knowledge, perceptions, and experiences of open science," Educational Psychology, vol. 10, no. 1, p. 2248765, 2023.
• [53] M. G. Bertram, J. Sundin, D. G. Roche, A. Sanches-Tojar, E. S. J. Thore and T. Brodin, "Open science," Current biology, vol. 33, no. 15, pp. R792-R797, 2023.
• [54] A. Maedche, E. Elshan, H. Hohle, C. Lehrer, J. Recker, A. Sunyaev, B. Sturm and O. Werth, "Open science: Towards Greater Transparency and Openness in Science.," Business & Information Systems Engineering, vol. 66, pp. 517-532, 2024.
• [55] J. A. Siegel, R. M. Calogero and T.-A. Roberts, "Identifying Gaps and Building Bridges Between Feminist Psychology and Open Science," Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 407-411, 2021.
• [56] F. Momeni, S. Dietze, P. Mayr, B. Kirstin and I. Peters, "Which factors are associated with Open Access publishing? A Springer Nature case study," Qualitative Science Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 353-371, 2023.
• [57] F. Oswald and S. K. Samra, "A scoping review and index of body stimuli in psychological science," Behavior research methods, p. 5434-5455, 2023.
• [58] R. Campbell, R. Goodman-Williams and M. Javorka, "A Trauma-Informed Approach to Sexual Violence Research Ethics and Open Science," Journal of Interpersonal Violence, vol. 34, no. 23-24, pp. 4765-4793, 2019.
• [59] L. Sweeney, M. von Loewenfeldt and M. Perry, "Saying it’s Anonymous Doesn't Make It So: Re-identifications of “anonymized” law school data," Technology Science, p. 2018111301, 2018.
• [60] B. Liu and L. Wei, "Unintended effects of open data policy in online behavioral research: An experimental investigation of participants’ privacy concerns and research validity," Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 139, p. 107537, 2023.
• [61] Elsevier, "Copyright," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/copyright.
• [62] Taylor & Francis, "Understanding copyright for journal authors," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-your-research/moving-through-production/copyright-for-journal-authors/.
• [63] American Psychological Association, "Internet posting guidelines," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/resources/internet-posting-guidelines.
• [64] American Journal of Psychology, "About," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/?id=ajp#pane-4.
• [65] UNESCO, "UNESCO Recomendation on Open Science," 2021. [Online].
• [66] OpenAI, "Introducing OpenAI o1-preview," 12 September 2024. [Online]. Available: https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai-o1-preview/ .[Accessed 29 November 2024].
• [67] M. Sullivan, A. Kelly and P. McLaughlan, "ChatGPT in higher education: Considerations for academic integrity and student learning," Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 31-40, 2023.
• [68] OpenAI, "New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text," 31 January 2023. [Online]. Available: https://openai.com/index/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text/. [Accessed 29 November 2024].
• [69] Y. Liu, M. Ott, N. Goyal, J. Du, M. Joshi, D. Chen, O. Levy, M. Lewis, L. Zettlemoyer and V. Stoyanov, "RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach," arXiv, p. 1907.11692, 26 July 2019.
• [70] S. Tong, K. Mao, Z. Huang, Y. Zhao and K. Peng, "Automating psychological hypothesis generation with AI: when large language models meet causal graph," Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, no. 11, p. 896, 2024.
• [71] C. A. Bail, "Can Generative AI improve social science?," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 121, no. 12, p. e2314021121, 2024.
• [72] L. Ciechanowski, D. Jemielniak and P. A. Gloor, "TUTORIAL: AI research without coding: The art of fighting without fighting: Data science for qualitative researchers," Journal of Business Research, vol. 117, pp. 322-330, 2020.
• [73] G. C. Feng, "Best practices for responsibly using AI tools in social sciences research," Media and Communication, vol. 10, p. 2420484, 2024.
• [74] P. Tomczyk, P. Brüggemann and D. Vrontis, "AI meets academia: transforming systematic literature reviews," EuroMed Journal of Business, 2024.
• [75] M. Salah, H. Al Halbusi and F. Abdelfattah, "May the force of text data analysis be with you: Unleashing the power of generative AI for social psychology research," Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 100006, 2023.
• [76] D. Haluza and D. Jungwirth, "Artificial Intelligence and Ten Societal Megatrends: An Exploratory Study Using GPT-3," Systems, vol. 11, no. 3, p. 120, 2023.
• [77] Y. K. Dwivedi, N. Kshetri, L. Hughes, E. L. Slade and A. Jeyaraj, "Opinion Paper: “So what if ChatGPT wrote it?” Multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges and implications of generative conversational AI for research, practice and policy," International Journal of Information Management, vol. 71, p. 102642, 2023.
• [78] N. Mehrabi and E. Pashaei, "Application of Horse Herd Optimization Algorithm for medical problems," in International Conference on INnovations in Intelligent SysTems and Applications (INISTA), Kocaeli, 2021.
• [79] P. Hacker, B. Mittelstadt, F. Z. Borgesius and S. Wachter, "Generative Discrimination: What Happens When Generative AI Exhibits Bias, and What Can Be Done About It," arXiv, p. 10329, 2024.
• [80] S. Urchs, V. Thurner, M. Aßenmacher, C. Heumann and S. Thiemichen, "How Prevalent is Gender Bias in ChatGPT? -- Exploring German and English ChatGPT Responses," arXiv, p. 03031, 2023.
• [81] R. E. Carter, Z. I. Attia, F. Lopez-Jimenez and P. A. Friedman, "Pragmatic considerations for fostering reproducible research in artificial intelligence," npj Digital Medicine, vol. 2, p. 42, 2019.
• [82] I. Ozsahin, B. Sekeroglu, M. S. Musa, M. T. Mustapha and D. U. Ozsahin, "Review on Diagnosis of COVID-19 from Chest CT Images Using Artificial Intelligence," Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine, pp. 1-10, 2020.
• [83] C. Singh, J. P. Inala, M. Galley, R. Caruana and J. Gao, "Rethinking Interpretability in the Era of Large Language Models," arXiv, p. 01761, 2024.
• [84] T. K. Gilbert, "Generative AI and generative education," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1, pp. 11-14, 2024.
• [85] A. Alshami, M. Elsayed, E. Ali, A. E. E. Eltoukhy and T. Zayed, "Harnessing the Power of ChatGPT for Automating Systematic Review Process: Methodology, Case Study, Limitations, and Future Directions," Systems, vol. 11, no. 7, p. 351, 2023.
• [86] M. W. Romaniuk and J. Łukasiewicz-Wieleba, "Information technologies in higher education teaching in the opinions of academic teachers," International Journal of Electronics and Telecommunications, vol. 70, no. 3, pp. 772-779, 2024.
• [87] M. W. Romaniuk and J. Łukasiewicz-Wieleba, "Information technology in teaching and learning process at higher education institutions in students’ opinions," International Journal of Electronics and Telecommunications, vol. 70, no. 3, pp. 767-772, 2024.
• [88] M. W. Romaniuk and J. Łukasiewicz-Wieleba, "Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Teaching Activities of Academic Teachers and Students," International Journal of Electronics and Telecommunications, vol. 70, no. 4, pp. 1043-1048, 2024.
• [89] M. W. Romaniuk, A. Szarfenberg and I. C.-K. K. Pawłowska, "Doctoral Theses in the Digital Age - ICT use by Social Sciences PhD Students of The Maria Grzegorzewska University," nternational Journal of Electronics and Telecommunications, vol. 1, no. 70, pp. 199-204, 2024.

Uwagi

Opracowanie rekordu ze środków MNiSW, umowa nr POPUL/SP/0154/2024/02 w ramach programu "Społeczna odpowiedzialność nauki II" - moduł: Popularyzacja nauki (2025).