Guidelines for Internet Research: An Update

As a new millennium approaches, humans and computers are interacting on an unprecedented scale and style. Conservative estimates suggest that in excess of 30 million people are internationally interconnected via the World Wide Web (GVU 7th WWW User Survey, 1995), and such figures continue to grow at an exponential rate. Unsurprisingly, the very nature of the internet has made it tantalizing as a potential research domain for many social and behavioral scientists. There are many real advantages of conducting research in an infrastructure such as the internet in terms of directed participant recruitment, collapsed geographic boundaries, time and cost efficiencies, and facilitated data collection and manipulation.