LETsReflecT – Legal and Ethical Reflection Tool for Using Sensitive Data

Researchers who intend to collect or use sensitive data (such as social media data, georeferenced survey data, and different types of interview data) need to navigate a range of legal and ethical issues. To this end, sound legal and ethical knowledge and advice are paramount. However, the capacity of research data management (RDM) professionals with sufficient expertise to provide such guidance is limited.

To help researchers navigate these ethical and legal issues at both the early and advanced stages of their projects, we are developing the LLM-based tool LETsReflecT. Researchers can ask the tool about how to appropriately approach their specific research goals, types of data to be collected/used, engagement with research participants, etc., from a legal and ethical perspective. Researchers can upload drafts of IRB (ethics committee) applications, data management plans, data protection impact assessments, general project outlines, or related project documentation – and LETsReflecT will highlight aspects that are missing, problematic, or need to be further reflected on.

The tool prompts the users to add explanations, contextual details, or documentation elements that are oftentimes missing from first drafts. To this end, LETsReflecT draws on curated legal and ethical text corpora, so that the tool explicitly refers to source texts when answering questions. This way, researchers are encouraged to directly engage with the original sources. The tool encourages users to seek professional consultation to discuss their revised documents – which should then have a much higher quality resulting from the reflection prompted by the tool.

Importantly, LETsReflecT’s main purpose is to promote active reflection by researchers, and to help them refine ethically/legally relevant documents related to research projects that involve sensitive data. The tool can also help RDM professionals with initial checks of documents that researchers submit to them. Crucially, LETsReflecT does not replace human expertise, but frees up the time of all involved parties to focus on the more complicated issues of research projects.

Target groups (among others):

• Early-career researchers and PhD students who may lack experience navigating data protection regulations and/or who have not received comprehensive ethics training
• Established researchers expanding their research to sensitive data types and newer methods, e.g., using computational social science methods for social media data
• RDM professionals advising on data collection and access practices, supporting compliant data handling from the outset, freeing expert staff for complex cases

Key advantages:

• Focus specifically on research contexts, e.g., academic exemptions under the GDPR
• Helps in revising a variety of project documents, such as IRB (ethics committee) applications, data protection impact assessments, data management plans, etc.
• Frees up time of researchers and RDM professionals to focus on the more complicated issues of a project
• Expert-curated repository of authoritative legal sources and high-quality ethical reflections and guidelines, rather than general purpose document collections
• The tool actively encourages consultation of primary sources, with verbatim quotes and links to sources being the goal formulated in the system prompt
• Full transparency, as users see exactly which documents are retrieved and how answers are generated
• Trustworthiness, as the tool is developed within and for the scientific community

We are currently developing the tool at GESIS and will let you know on this page once it is available for external use. If you would like to learn more or be involved in the development or early testing of the tool, please do not hesitate to reach out to us (see contact details below)!