Dogs or not dogs?
Examining ACI authors' reporting on animal participants' willingness to engage in research: a spotlight on mediated and contingent consent
About the Project
How do Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) researchers working with live animal participants assess the animals’ willingness to participate in their research? In this paper we present the results of a systematic literature review designed to answer this question by examining the Proceedings of the ACM International Animal Computer Interaction Conference. From 2016-2022, these proceedings included 38 full papers that reported results from research with live animal participants. We found 1) only 74% or 28/38 of the papers reported how they assessed animal participants’ willingness to engage during their research, 2) the authors of papers focused on species other than dogs had a much higher rate of providing this information than did the authors of dog-based studies (100% or 12/12 non-dog papers v 62% or 16/26 of dog-based papers), 3) most researchers who addressed the issue of an animal participant’s willingness to engage in the research relied on some form of mediated consent, informed by behavioral observation methods, to do so. However, the researchers focused on non-dog species were much more likely than researchers focused on dogs to include elements of contingent consent in their protocols (75% (9/12) of the non-dog studies v 12% (3/26) of the dog-related studies). We argue that providing each other with more details about our research methods and possibly more fully embracing the principles of contingent consent would further ACI researchers’ existing ethical commitment to our animal participants, increase our adherence to standard scientific research practice, and accelerate the continued development of the field of Animal-Computer Interaction.
Publications
McGraw, E. B., Bosco, C., Brey, L., & Nippert-Eng, C. (2023, December). Dogs or not dogs? Examining ACI authors' reporting on animal participants' willingness to engage in research: a spotlight on mediated and contingent consent. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction (pp. 1-13). Link.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Department of Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington for its support.