REFLECTing SPERET: Measuring and Promoting Ethics and Privacy Reflexivity in Eye-Tracking Research

TL;DR

This paper introduces two tools, REFLECT and SPERET, to measure and promote ethics and privacy reflexivity among eye-tracking researchers, addressing a gap in empirical reflection on ethical practices.

Contribution

It develops and validates the REFLECT questionnaire and SPERET scale to systematically assess ethical and privacy reflexivity in eye-tracking research.

Findings

Researchers are concerned about user privacy.

Methodological constraints like sample bias are recognized.

Ethical responsibility evolves with project maturity.

Abstract

The proliferation of eye tracking in high-stakes domains - such as healthcare, marketing and surveillance - underscores the need for researchers to be ethically aware when employing this technology. Although privacy and ethical guidelines have emerged in recent years, empirical research on how scholars reflect on their own work remains scarce. To address this gap, we present two complementary instruments developed with input from more than 70 researchers: REFLECT, a qualitative questionnaire, and SPERET (Latin for "hope"), a quantitative psychometric scale that measures privacy and ethics reflexivity in eye tracking. Our findings reveal a research community that is concerned about user privacy, cognisant of methodological constraints, such as sample bias, and that possesses a nuanced sense of ethical responsibility evolving with project maturity. Together, these tools and our analyses offer a systematic examination and a hopeful outlook on reflexivity in eye-tracking research, promoting more privacy and ethics-conscious practice.