Surveyfail: A Fiasco of Ethical Proportions
Note
The paper below was written during Fall 2009 for Rhetoric of Science and Technology, a core component of the Master’s of Written Communication program at Eastern Michigan University. I recently read it again for the first time since receiving my grade (an A, which is better than I thought it deserved), and remembered why I thought I got off easy on the grading. There are a couple of sweeping generalizations in the intro that should have been cleaned up and at least one reference that could legitimately be described as pastede on, yay! Despite those issues, I believe the paper has merit in terms of defining Surveyfail from the perspective of failed communication.
Tara Keezer
June 5, 2011
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The Players
The term “fandom” is used to describe a participatory culture whose members share a common interest in a form of entertainment, whether a television show, musician, movie, book or other type of mass media. Within the last ten years, fandom has developed beyond the conventions and fanzines of earlier days into communities on the Internet. For researchers interested in working with a self-organized community of like-minded people, fandom in general is an attractive option as a study group, regardless of the specific interests of individual fen (plural of fan), because of the size of the population.
There are, however, drawbacks to using fandom as a study population. One is that Web-based fandom comprises a vast majority of women (some estimates put the population at upwards of 98 percent female), so studies would necessarily be gender specific. Another problem is that a significant number of fen are under the age of eighteen and unable to give consent, informed or otherwise, to participate in research. But perhaps the biggest issue is that active fen are primarily Web-based, with only occasional forays into situations that allow for face-to-face meetings with other fen.
With the subject population easily accessible only via the Internet, researchers face difficulties in terms of obtaining informed consent, ensuring that their research subjects are of age to give informed consent and ensuring that privacy concerns are addressed, among other issues. Additionally, as Heidi McKee and James Porter explain in The Ethics of Internet Research, there are even more fundamental questions involved:
In the process of planning, conducting, and writing-up research, what criteria and procedures should (or could) researchers use to negotiate and make ethical decisions? And, on the audience end, by what criteria and procedures should participants, readers, colleagues, reviewers, and editors consider the ethical legitimacy of such projects? (5)
Adding to the confusion is the determination of what makes a public space public. McKee and Porter point out that participants online tend to think of their postings as private within the scope of the forum to which they are posting and do not feel that researchers have the right to access, analyze or quote that text, even though the text itself is clearly within a public space (assuming, that is, that the forum itself does not require membership for access). The quandary for researchers, then, is one of maintaining the ability to conduct research via public spaces versus obtaining informed consent from participants whose text may be public but who feel their communication is private (6).
Despite these difficulties, researchers are, in fact, turning more and more to internet-based communities to perform their research. Depending on the type of commonality between a community’s member population (gamers, genealogists, fen, etc.), a researcher may have access to a group that spans the globe or is restricted to a single offline location (e.g., students at a specific school or employees of a specific company). Because there is a specific commonality, the researcher can go to a community and have a reasonable expectation of being able to conduct her study using the best population for her purposes, whatever they may be.
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Prologue
In July 2009, two neuroscientists, purporting to be affiliated with Boston University, approached several members of fandom, one of whom uses an Internet handle of Shaggirl, to request assistance with research they wanted to conduct. The primary researcher, Ogi Ogas, Ph.D., told Shaggirl that they had a contract with Dutton, an imprint of Penguin, to write a book “about how the Internet reveals new insights into some of the oldest circuits in our brain which control romantic attraction and sexual behavior,” adding that they were interested in “learning about how people creatively use text and fiction to express and explore sexuality” and that he and his associate, Sai Gaddam, Ph.D., would be happy to include a positive mention of Shaggirl and her popular fan fiction recommendation community, Crack Van (Shaggirl, 19 Jul 2009). When Shaggirl requested additional information, Gaddam replied:
The internet and e-publishing now allow for a revolutionary and unprecedented disclosure of all our fantasies, not just those decided as marketable and mainstream for print. Digital publishing seems to have lead to an explosion in the array of fantasies we can now experience and learn from; the loop of imagination, desire, and actuality is now tighter. We want to ‘neuro-scientifically’ explore what this blossoming of fantasy means for us as individuals, and as a society. How does this access to all manner of fantasies imaginable change our brains? (Shaggirl, 19 Jul 2009)
The language both men used was scientific and respectful, which seemed at odds with the casual slang found in the original title of the book, Rule 34: What Netporn Teaches Us About The Brain (the book has since been retitled as Rule 34 [Gail Ross Literary Agency LLC]). Still, on the face of it, their request was intriguing. It seemed to be a genuine offer to study a portion of fandom that mainstream audiences might not understand — the portion that reads and writes slash fan fiction.
This sub genre of fan fiction features a romantic pairing — most often between two male characters, though the term can include female couples as well — that does not occur in canon. The term came about when fan fiction writers in the Star Trek fandom started to use a virgule between the names Kirk and Spock (i.e., Kirk/Spock) to denote a story that featured the two characters as a romantic pairing. When fan writers extended their efforts to other shows, the virgule continued to be the punctuation of choice to represent a romantic pairing (e.g., Starsky/Hutch, Holmes/Watson, McKay/Sheppard, etc.). Slash includes stories that range from “G” rated — suitable for all ages and audiences — to “NC-17” rated — adult readers only due to sexually explicit content, so given Ogas and Gaddam’s stated research interest, their request made sense.
Despite the early promise of their approach to fandom, it became clear by the end of August 2009 that Ogas and Gaddam had failed to uphold their initially presented ethos in a number of crucial areas, including understanding their subject population, communicating honestly with their subject population and, indeed, conducting their research in an objectively ethical manner. This paper will analyze these individual failures within a rhetorical framework and will also discuss the failure of the researchers to maintain their ethos both prior to and in the face of significant negative response from their subject population. In the end, it is hoped that this situation, dubbed “Surveyfail” by fandom, will serve as guide for other researchers hoping to work with Web-based communities.
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Act One
To understand where Ogas and Gaddam first went wrong, it is important to understand the fan fiction writing portion of fandom as a participatory culture. In Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins offers several characteristics of a participatory culture, including “members who believe their contributions matter, and members who feel some degree of social connection with one another” (pp. 5-6). These particular defining characteristics are the most relevant in terms of what it means for researchers to approach fandom for purposes of study. Fen who write fan fiction are very much aware of who they are and what they expect of one another. In many ways, fen exemplify Bonnie Stewart’s explanation that knowledge represents “positions from which people make sense of their worlds and their place in them, and from which they construct their concepts of agency, the possible, and their own capacities to do” (20). By virtue of the nature of their participation — creating transformative works that explore the subtext of canon, develop the characters beyond what is seen in canon or develop a canon storyline beyond what was presented by the copyright owner — fen know without question that their contributions to fandom as a whole matter, because their participation is reinforced by audience reaction. With this expectation as a normal and natural part of their experience of fandom, fen tend to extrapolate an expectation of the relevance of their contributions to areas beyond fandom. In other words, fen expect researchers to listen when they speak.
Beyond the individual contributions of transformative works, the social connection between fen can be viewed as rhetorical communication, with the creator of the transformative work as rhetor, the work itself as the message and the fen who view the work as the audience. Rather than being passive recipients of a transformative work, however, a fannish audience actively engages with the person who created and posted the work in question. Most often, this is a positive transaction, with readers expressing what they liked about the work in question and how that work affected them. In return, the author responds with her own thoughts about the work and the feedback she has received. At that point, the work may be left as is, or the author may choose to expand on it in the form of a sequel. There is constant communication between and about each segment of the rhetorical communication.
Further, there is no secret about this constant and all-encompassing interaction. Researchers simply need to go to one of the larger communities on LiveJournal or to Fanfiction.net to see the level of engagement between reader and author, and in doing so, they can reasonably extrapolate that fandom will, in fact, engage an outside researcher as a novice peer rather than as an authority figure. Even without preliminary research, this attitude could be seen in the comments on Shaggirl’s July 19, 2009 post, where the responses to her initial post about Ogas and Gaddam’s interest in fandom offered specific suggestions as to how the researchers should proceed with their study. Additionally, there were early questions about just how Ogas and Gaddam would be able to conduct their study without also using functional magnetic resonance imaging to record participants’ blood flow in the brain; this type of test can be useful when studying brain structure (Shaggirl post, 19 Jul 2009. Sauced_again comment). These comments were made in the full expectation that the fen who wrote them would be viewed as authority figures when it came to fandom.
Ogas and Gaddam, however, failed to see that rather than communicating with a passive audience willing to accept their authority in the matter of their research, they were approaching an actively engaged audience who had no qualms about asserting their own authority over themselves and their activities. This confusion was, perhaps, understandable. As McKee and Porter point out, despite the fact that a “rhetorical approach to research ethics begins by viewing research involving human participants as fundamentally a communication situation,” the United States, Canada and other nations’ regulations concerning human research “tend to treat human subjects as just that — subjects … who, once they have consented, exist passively as objects of study and who do not contribute in any dialogic way …” (pp. 13-14). Add to that attitude Ogas and Gaddam’s statement of, “First, let us say state clearly that we are not psychologists, nor are we cultural critics” (Jonquil, 31 Aug 2009), and it is easy to understand why fen began spreading the word not to participate: the researchers had just stated they were not qualified to conduct their own survey.
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Act Two
In Ogas and Gaddam’s earliest communications with Shaggirl and other fen, the language was respectful and reasonably clear. They explained what they hoped to do without resorting to scientific idiom and presented themselves as newcomers in need of a guide (Shaggirl, 19 Jul 2009). However, when the survey finally went live on August 30, 2009, the language had gone from comprehensible to incomprehensibly scientific in the introduction to their survey: “The structure and activity of our subcortical circuits are shaped by neurohormones such as testosterone, estrogen, oxytocin, progesterone, and vasopressin…” (Fanfic Survey). Neither researcher offered a definition of neurohormone, nor did they explain how a discussion of neurohormones fit into a research study that was strictly survey-based and would not do any physiologic testing of the participants. This lack of definition might have been acceptable had they known their audience only comprised other scientists who were already familiar with the concepts. However, regardless of the actual demographics of the fen surveyed, Ogas and Gaddam should have proceeded on the assumption that their audience was composed of lay people who were only marginally familiar with scientific discourse. Had they done so, those reviewing the introduction to the survey would have had a better understanding of both the survey and the nature of their participation.
Another well-known fan, Eruthros, had been contacted at the same time as Shaggirl, most likely because Eruthros runs a popular fan fiction challenge, Kink bingo. She told Ogas and Gaddam that “Kink bingo is a political project with a basis in queer theory. Kink bingo attempts to redefine kink, to question the naturalness of our responses…” and added further down the communication that when those who are homosexual or otherwise viewed as deviant, when they are in the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], researchers have “taken popular discourses of sexuality and made them concrete and real” (Eruthros, 31 Aug 2009). In effect, she pointed out that the nature of Ogas and Gaddam’s research meant that rather than empowering its research subjects, the effect would be to other their research subjects. Her response was detailed, and although it was universally negative in its estimation of the proposed research, Eruthros took the time to explain why she felt as she did. Additionally, Eruthros’s overall tone was that of one academic to another.
In response to Eruthros’s refusal to participate and rebuke of their methodology and research goals, Gaddam attempted to address her concerns, stating explicitly that they were not “concerned with acquiring titillating descriptions for various labeled sexual behaviors” (Eruthros, 31 Aug 2009). This statement would perhaps have been more believable had it not been for the actual survey, which included questions about rape fantasies, whether readers enjoyed stories about characters changing gender and what types of kinks the respondent enjoyed reading about. Despite his disingenuous response, Gaddam seemed sincere in his efforts to explain his and Ogas’s purpose in conducting the survey. However, his technical and somewhat rambling reply failed to persuade Eruthros, which could have been predicted by Aristotle, who wrote, “[A]uthors should compose without being noticed and should seem to speak not artificially but naturally” (222).
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Act Three
In Title 45, Part 46: Protection of Human Subjects, the United States Department of Health and Human Services has codified the protection of human participants in research. This protection is supposed to be assured by a given institutional review board (IRB) appraising proposed research to ensure that it protects those who participate, not only physically but emotionally and mentally as well. Based on Ogas and Gaddam’s assertion that they were affiliated with Boston University (Shaggirl, 19 Jul 2009), fen who were aware of the approval process for human research assumed that Ogas and Gaddam had satisfied Boston University’s IRB as to the particulars of their study, including the questions they were asking. This assumption, however, died in late August, when the survey went up.
Based on the questions, the lack of an informed consent document, the lack of a way to opt out after the survey was completed, the lack of any attempt to prevent underage respondents from participating, the fact that the online survey seemed to be recording IP addresses in violation of reasonable expectations of privacy, and the fact that Ogas and Gaddam were rewriting the survey while it was live and in progress, fen started to get more persistent in asking the pair about IRB approval. These questions were asked by many, many people before one fan, Deadlychameleon, finally called Boston University to ask whether or not Ogas and Gaddam had IRB approval to run the survey. She was told that the school had received numerous e-mails asking the same question and that the only affiliation Ogas and Gaddam had with Boston University was as recent graduates. Boston University also told Deadlychameleon that Ogas and Gaddam had been asked to stop using their University e-mail address and Web space in conjunction with this project, presumably because the survey itself was tied to the book Ogas and Gaddam were writing rather than any University-sanctioned research.
Whatever good intentions Ogas and Gaddam may have had with regard to the survey and the questions they asked were essentially destroyed by their lack of honesty with fandom. Dr. Ogas lied in the first sentence of the e-mail he sent to Shaggirl when he said, “I’m a cognitive neuroscientist at Boston University…” (Shaggirl, 19 Jul 2009), and the fact of that lie incensed fandom even further than it already was (simply based on the questions, which were regarded as both insensitive and triggery) once it came to light. Further, it wasn’t just lay people who were appalled by these tactics; academics were also disturbed. One, Robin Anne Reid of A&M Commerce, reported that she sent an e-mail to Boston University’s IRB to express her concerns over Ogas and Gaddam’s apparent disregard of fen’s questions about their procedures and whether or not they had received IRB approval, writing:
Besides issues not relevant to the Institutional Review Board (the badly written questions, the complete lack of knowledge concerning fanfiction), I am most concerned the cavalier approach to questions concerning human subject projection in this project being expressed by the academics doing the research. (Schrag, 4 Sept 2009, Reid comment)
Once Ogas and Gaddam’s perfidy was uncovered, fandom reacted with a degree of hostility equal to the perceived violation of ethical standards. One fan wrote real people slash (i.e., a slash story featuring real people instead of fictional characters borrowed from a fandom) with Ogas and Gaddam portraying the lovers in the story. Another fan created an image manipulation that touched on Ogas’s history as a game show contestant and added elements of tentacle pornography, non-consensual sex, and frontal nudity. Although a number of fen questioned the value of responding to unethical behavior with fiction and image manipulations that could themselves be regarded as unethical, many felt the punishment fit the crime. As it seemed likely that neither Ogas nor Gaddam would suffer institutional backlash beyond Boston University’s request that they stop using the school’s e-mail and Web site to promote their book, the desire to see them punished in some way is understandable.
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Epilogue
In On Rhetoric, Aristotle rather baldly stated, “Since most people are rather bad, slaves of profitmaking and cowardly in danger, being at the mercy of another is in most cases a cause of fear…” (pp. 139-140). As cynical as this statement appears to be, it does provide a measure of understanding as to how Ogas and Gaddam ultimately responded by deleting all comments they had left on LiveJournal as well as deleting their own LiveJournal accounts. Fandom had already shown that it was willing to contact their last known authority (Boston University) as well as their literary agents. It is unknown whether anyone went so far as to contact their publishing house, Dutton, to complain, although the possibility was discussed in a now-deleted thread on one of the posts Ogas made to his own LiveJournal. That fear may also explain Ogas’s parting words to Shaggirl.
On September 2, 2009, following her efforts to defend Ogas and Gaddam’s interactions with fandom, Shaggirl made a post entitled “I was wrong.” In it, she included text from a letter Ogas wrote to her in a tone that can legitimately be described as gleeful. Rather than express remorse, Ogas instead talked about how happy he was with the number of responses they received and made it clear that he would use them in apparent disregard of efforts to have responses discarded (Ogas post comments, 30 Aug 2009, now deleted). This attitude underscored fandom’s estimation of Ogas and Gaddam as dishonest researchers who were uninterested in maintaining any level of ethical engagement with their research subjects.
Although Ogas and Gaddam may understand neuroscience, it is clear from the events that transpired during the summer of 2009 that neither man understands rhetoric (or how to conduct human research) nor how to use rhetoric to engage their subject population. On the contrary, based on their reaction to queries (i.e., refusing to answer reasonable questions such as whether they had IRB approval), neither felt a pressing need to address their research subjects’ concerns, perhaps relying on the dubious authority of their recently granted doctorates. Had they viewed their efforts in the light of rhetorical communication, it seems likely they could have avoided generating the ill will that resulted. Fannish resentment is likely to have a lasting impact on future researchers, who will no doubt find their interest suspect and their behavior held to a higher standard than even IRBs insist on.
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Citations
Aristotle. On Rhetoric. Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford Press, 1991. Print.
Deadlychameleon. “Bad research and fandom: Surveyfail.” LiveJournal, 2 Sept 2009. Web. [http://deadlychameleon.livejournal.com/230809.html]
Eruthros. “[P]lease don’t take the fanfiction survey.” Dreamwidth. 31 Aug 2009. Web. 3 Dec 2009. [http://eruthros.dreamwidth.org/273840.html]
Fanfic Survey. “About This Survey.” Now deleted. Web. [http://fanficsurvey.appspot.com/static/about.html]
Jenkins, Henry, et al. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009. Print.
Jonquil. “Harry Winston, tell me all about me!” LiveJournal, 31 Aug 2009. Web. 30 Nov 2009. [http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/864061.html]
McKee, Heidi A., and James E. Porter. The Ethics of Internet Research. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. Print.
Ogi_Ogas. LiveJournal. Now deleted. Web. [http://ogi-ogas.livejournal.com/1058.html?view=134434#t134434]
Schrag, Zachary. “Internet Survey Sparks Outrage.” Institutional Review Blog, 4 Sept 2009. Web. [http://www.institutionalreviewblog.com/2009/09/internet-survey-sparks-outrage.html]
Shaggirl. “Rule 34, or: tentacle porn, what tentacle porn?” LiveJournal 19 Jul 2009. Web. 25 Nov 2009. [http://shaggirl.livejournal.com/185387.html]
Shaggirl. “I was wrong.” LiveJournal, 2 Sept 2009. Web. 30 Nov 2009. [http://shaggirl.livejournal.com/190980.html]
Stewart, Bonnie. “Techknowledge: Literate practice and digital worlds.” New York Studies in Media Studies 7. PDF. [http://www.egs.edu/mediaphi/pdfs/bonnie-stewart-techknowledge.pdf]
