Can you trust your participants? How not to get scammed when recruiting online

Kim and Chen’s (2025) compelling framework of value, trust, and agency advocates for more inclusive online data collection practices in applied linguistics. In our response to Kim and Chen’s (2025) commentary, we seek to build on the proposed list of suggestions for enhancing a sense of trust. To do so, we reflect on four case studies that come from our own work and share lessons learned from our own online data collection experiences. Ultimately, we aim to expand the framework of research inclusivity by demonstrating that trust between researchers and participants is inherently reciprocal.