UT Dallas Professor Captures the Mobile Interactions of 175 Texas Teens

nonprofiteer writes "A University of Texas-Dallas developmental psychology professor has used a $3.4 million NIH grant to purchase Blackberries for 175 Texas teens, capturing every text message, email, photo, and IM they've sent over the past 4 years.Half a million new messages pour into the database every month. The researchers don't 'directly ask' the teens about privacy issues because they don't want to remind them they're being monitored. So many legal and ethical issues here. I can't believe this is IRB-approved. Teens sending nude photos alone could make that database legally toxic. And then there's the ethical issue of monitoring those who have not consented to be part of the study, but are friends with those who have. When a friend texted one participant about selling drugs, he responded, 'Hey, be careful, the BlackBerry people are watching, but don't worry, they won't tell anyone.'" This sounds like an American version of the "Seven Up" series.

Comments

Re:Expensive blackberries

[Hadlock]

My friend works for that research group. They upgrade the teen's phones every year to the newest "flagship" phone. Keep in mind that the kids opting in to this need a reason to continue with the project. That means a new iPhone2, iPhone 3, iPhone 3S, iphone4, iPhone4s etc. I think most of the kids switched off blackberries a long time ago.
 
I'm not sure how big the research team is, but there's at least 4 full time non-students in the group. They don't keep an archive of all the data, interestingly. Probably for privacy reasons. They do classify the data in to positive/negative text messages, and identify who in the group are the alphas, betas, etc.
 
I honestly wouldn't worry about the kid's data privacy/rights, knowing who works in that group, they're all a really good group of people and outstanding citizens overall.

Re:I have a better idea

[macwhizkid]

You do know that R01 grants aren't exactly done on a secret handshake agreement, right? There are so many hoops academic researchers have to jump through to get federal funding. And I say that as someone who almost lost his job the day after landing a big grant, because I accidentally kept someone out of the loop. Your grant proposal gets reviewed by your department people, by the IRB committee, by the university's office of research, and by internal counsel (if needed) BEFORE it ever leaves campus. And then it gets reviewed by program officers, and many impartial and often vicious grant reviewers. And let's not forget that NIH grant success rates in many institutes are approaching 10%, so likely it won't matter at all because you won't get funded.

And, shockingly, the grant description has been available at NIH.gov since at least 2009: "An important innovation of this phase of the longitudinal study will be careful assessment of social aggression in online communication by providing adolescents with handheld devices and recording and coding the content of their text messaging, Instant Messaging, and email communication."

You personally may disagree with the decision that the project is ethical, but you can't argue that they weren't honest with everyone about what they set out to do.