Request to Participate In An Interview For Carnegie Mellon - Workplace Stack Exchange Use

Question

I recently received an email asking to participate in a Carnegie Mellon study regarding my use of the Workplace StackExchange for career guidance. I have included an image of the email just in case any of the links are malicious. I have visited the CMU review board site at http://www.cmu.edu/research-compliance/human-subject-research/faqs.html but I am unable to find somewhere to search for a specific study.

Has anyone seen an email like this before? It specifically says it is not associated with Stack Exchange officially.

Update: I received a follow up email. Instead of providing a link to anything official, they instead decided to provide a link to THIS META POST to prove the legitimacy of the study. CMU probably needs to rethink this whole research thing...

Answer 1

That seems suspicious; in particular, you don't publish your email address on the site that I can see. The IRB email address looks legitimate (andrew.cmu.edu is the main domain at CMU), so you might forward it there to ask.

I personally know one of the researchers listed there and will pass along a link to this post.

Update: I asked one of the listed researchers, who confirmed to me that the project is legitimate and put me in touch with Maria Tomprou, the PI (using a CMU email address). Maria explained that they sent out the email from their lab account but followup would come from CMU. The researcher I contacted has also asked the IRB to make a searchable list of approved projects available online.

Here are some excerpts from Maria's email to me (quoted with permission):

This is the project that I am responsible for. We have received an IRB approval about this. Please see the attachment. We use the gmail account of our lab (Connected Experience or CoEx) that we have created for research purposes and if participants contact us, we use our regular cmu e-mail.

Attached was an IRB approval form signed by John Zimmerman, IRB Chair.

Also in the momentum to reduce any inconvenience I might have caused to you or the Users, I completely skipped to offer some background about my project and its importance.

Brief description:
Online communities like Workplace have completely transformed the meaning of career advice seeking and offering compared to more traditional forms of mentoring (e.g. with your supervisor, peers) that may hinder your career or offer biased advice (often called the dark side of mentoring). So we want to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms such as motives, usefulness, attributions of how this new form of mentoring functions as well as the impact of the advice from Workplace channel on people’s careers. How does this online community impact User’s career trajectories, negotiations, finding a job, changing careers etc? Does Workplace replace the traditional mentoring? All these are important issues not only for the role of online communities but also what organizations can learn and benefit from these kinds of communications.

Answer 2

I think the email is genuine.

• The website is referenced from http://hcii.cmu.edu/facilities.
• The email address is referenced from an older version of the website.

They probably removed the email from the website after getting spammed once too often.

I find it rather strange though that they cannot get an email address on the CMU domain, but that alone does not make it spam. Perhaps Ann Matthias can shed some more light on that. ;-)