When Cyberresearch Goes Awry: The Ethics of the Rimm "Cyberporn" Study

Like most things that we take for granted, we rarely pay attention to ethical issues in research until something goes horribly wrong. Focusing on a recent cyberresearch project gone awry, this essay illustrates why ethical issues should be continually confronted and discussed by scholars and nonscholars alike.     

Head injury secondary to suspected child maltreatment: results of a prospective Canadian national surveillance program

Objective

We sought to determine the incidence, clinical features, and demographic profile of head injury secondary to suspected child maltreatment (abuse or neglect) in Canada to help inform the development and evaluation of prevention programs for abusive head injuries.

Methods

From March 1, 2005 to February 28, 2008, an average of 2,545 paediatricians and paediatric subspecialists were surveyed monthly through the established network of the Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program. We calculated incidence rates using the number of confirmed cases over the product of the duration of the study (3 years) and population estimates by age group.

Results

There were 220 confirmed cases of head injury from suspected child maltreatment. The annual incidence rate was 14.1 per 100,000 for children less than 1 year of age and 1.4 per 100,000 for those less than 15 years. Seventy three percent (141) of cases involved infants less than 12 months of age and 52% (100) of cases involved infants less than 6 months of age. Seventy-five percent (165) of cases presented to the emergency room. With regard to outcome, 12% (27) of cases resulted in death and 45% (75) of survivors had neurological sequelae at discharge. Thirty percent (67) of all cases, as well as 30% (8) of deaths were previously known to child welfare authorities.

Conclusion

This study provides an estimate of the rate of head injury secondary to suspected child maltreatment in Canada. The young age and poor medical outcomes of those involved highlights the need for prevention efforts that are implemented early in life. Given that a significant percentage of injured infants and children were already known to child welfare authorities, the study also highlights the need to establish and evaluate additional preventive efforts for parents and caregivers already in the child welfare system.     

Rapid Prototyping a Collections-based Mobile Wayfinding Application

This research presents the results of a project that investigated how students use a library developed mobile app to locate books in the library. The study employed a methodology of formative evaluation so that the development of the mobile app would be informed by user preferences for next generation wayfinding systems. A key finding is the importance of gathering ongoing user feedback for designing useful and used mobile academic library applications. Elements and data points to include in future mobile interfaces are discussed.     

Citizen reactions to municipalities’ Instagram communication

In this paper, we explore how local governments are using Instagram as a communication tool to engage with their citizens, using data from the municipalities of Andalusia (Spain). We seek to identify the determinants of local government use of Instagram, the determinants of activity in this channel and the determinants of citizen reactions in order to understand the influence of media types (picture, video or album) used in municipality posts, and to understand content type (what the post is about). Instaloader, an open source intelligence (OSINT) tool for Instagram, was applied. It made it possible to automatically extract all posts of the analysed municipalities (14,742 posts). These were later automatically analysed using R, an open source software. It was determined that of the 29 Andalusian local governments with the highest populations, only those that maintain an account on Instagram, totalling 17 municipalities (58.62%), would be part of the final analysis. Our findings demonstrate that when local governments have a high level of debt, they do not maintain and actively use Instagram accounts. We also found that quality of posts’ content is more important than quantity of followers, since there is no significant relationship between citizen reactions and the number of inhabitants of a municipality or the number of followers (audience), while there is a significant negative relationship between the number of posts (activity) and reactions. Our results also highlight that the level of reactions can be stimulated by certain media and content types.