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Ethics

Last modified by Janne Matikainen on 2026/03/19 14:01

You should always consider the ethics of your collection and research methods before doing research. As the relevant ethical guidelines always depend on the specific subject of your research, you should note that this section does not cover all of the ethical guidelines that might be relevant for your purposes. This section lists some general ethical guidelines of digital research to check before implementing your research. 

General national and institutional guidelines, manuals and articles on the ethics of Internet research

Tutkimuseettinen neuvottelukunta (TENK)

  • The ethical principles of research with human participants and ethical review in the human sciences in Finland
  • 2019 TENK guidelines of the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity [fi,  sv, en] are the most important and binding guidelines in Finland.

Vastuullinentiede.fi is a webpage with several useful articles on research ethics. It is updated by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (Tieteellisten seurain valtuuskunta).

  • This article by Salla-Maaria Laaksonen discusses ethical questions related to Internet research.

University of Helsinki research ethics page includes general information on the University's stance towards ethical research. These include social media guidelines, among others.

Finnish Social Science Data Archive (Tietoarkisto) stores and shares datasets. Their Data Management Guidelines are useful for general long-term data storage considerations. 

Academy of Finland (Suomen Akatemia) requires ethical considerations (sharing, ownership, sensitivity) already in application phase data management plan.

Article by Janne Matikainen discusses sensitive social media data and ethics (in Finnish).

Professional ethical guidelines for Internet and digital research

Rajapinta ry's ethics

  • Collection of different ethical guidelines regarding social sciences and digital research
  • An important list of discussion openers

Association of Internet Researchers' (AoIR) recommendations for ethics in internet research

  • Most recent ethical guidelines (PDF, 2019) that can be used as a reference publication.
  • AoIR's ethics documents are the most widely acknowledged guidelines in the field.
  • AoIR's  ethics chart works as an starting point for Internet researchers to consider ethics:

Articles:

Mancosu, M., & Vegetti, F. (2020). What You Can Scrape and What Is Right to Scrape: A Proposal for a Tool to Collect Public Facebook Data. Social Media and Society, 6(3), 205630512094070

Markham, A., Herman, A. & Tiidenberg, K. (2018) 'Ethics as Method' special issue in Social Media + Society  https://journals.sagepub.com/page/sms/collections/ethics-as-method