A scale for measuring consumers’ ethical perceptions of social media research

Social media have become increasingly seductive as means to collect consumer data without necessarily making consumers fully aware of such data collection practices (Pettit 2011; Poynter 2011). This can raise ethical concerns. Online qualitative methodologies that rely on observations through social media have become increasingly popular among marketing academics (Braunsberger and Buckler 2011; Cova and Pace 2006; Kozinets 2002, 2006, 2009, 2010). But so have various online quantitative data collection methods that use tracking technologies such as cookies (Palmer 2005), and other forms of marketing dataveillance (Ashworth and Free 2006). Despite current academic and practitioner-led debates regarding the morality of online research, to date scant research has been published on consumers’ ethical perceptions regarding how they are currently researched on social media, which is a knowledge gap this research seeks to address. To this end, our research attempts to develop a quantitative instrument that captures consumers’ ethical perceptions of social media research. The following sections present the background, methodology, analysis performed and results.