Newsday published an investagation into racial discrimination in the housing market. They trained 25 undercover testers, who interacted with 93 real estate agents and secretly recorded 240 hours of meetings. The investigation is not only an indictment of unfair practices in the housing market, it shows interesting new ways to gather observational data in real-life settings. Social research could implement similar approaches to tackle myriad highly relevant research topics. Important issues to keep in mind are questions of research ethics and legal issues when filming subjects secretly. The 240 hours of video recordings collected by the Newsday team also comprise an example of potentially fascinating applications for computer vision in social science research.
Category: News