A practitioner-centered policy roadmap for ethical computational social science in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland

Background: Computational Social Science (CSS) utilizes large digital datasets and computational methods to study human behavior, raising ethical concerns about data privacy, informed consent, and potential misuse.Methods: This study employs a constructivist grounded theory approach, analyzing 15 in-depth interviews with CSS practitioners in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. These countries share a European legal context regarding data privacy and hereby provide a comparable regulatory environment for examining ethical considerations.Results: Findings highlight key challenges in CSS research, including power imbalances with data providers, uncertainties around surveillance and data privacy (especially with longitudinal data), and limitations of current ethics frameworks. Researchers face tensions between established ethical principles and practical realities, often feeling disempowered and lacking support from ethics boards due to their limited CSS expertise. Regulatory ambiguity further discourages research due to fear of sanctions.Conclusions: To foster responsible CSS practices, this paper recommends establishing specialized ethics boards with CSS expertise. It also advocates for acknowledging CSS's unique nature in research policy by developing tailored data guidelines and providing legal certainty through clear guidelines. Grounding recommendations in practitioners' experiences, this study offers actionable steps to help enable ethical CSS research.