Ethical issues about qualitative studies especially in this digital era is complex and ambiguous sometimes. Thanks to Tim’s reflection, I reviewed the 2012 report from AoIR (Association of Information Researchers) ethics working committee: Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research. It is a good supplement to what I learned from Markham’s article about fabrication.
The ethical related decision making is even harder than recalling the ethical principles such as privacy and confidentiality. It seriously intertwines with researchers’ ideological beliefs, political and academic culture environment (IRB for example), one’s disciplinary assumptions, and one’s methodological approaches. To consider about internet ethnographic research, the first ethical concern is the privacy. For my online forum studies, the posts can be viewed publicly without login information, and thus IRB approval, according to their policy, should not be a big deal.
The guidelines provided by the report is quite useful, and I’d like to share with my dear classmates. Although the ambiguous debate keeps on about private/public, human/textual message, and who is human subject, the major concern should be still given to people who are vulnerable.
In practice, following questions need to be kept in mind when conducting relative online research:
1. how is the context conceptualized? what are ethical expectations related to that context?
It is very important that how participants view the venue you are investigating. If it is a closed virtual community with rigorous terms of use, more ethical concerns may be probably expected. By contrast, if encountering public data with no personal information nor stakeholders, less ethical issues need to be in mind.
2. how is the context accessed? how researcher and participants are situated in the context? Is there any need to accommodate to “perceived privacy” in ethical concerns even if it is public data?
3. What are different ethical expectations for participants and researchers in the context?
4. What is the ethical expectation for similar studies you are going to investigate?
5. How data will be securely managed, stored and represented?
6. How are finding presented?
7. Any potential harms nor grades to participants within the group?
8. How are we recognizing the autonomy of others and acknowledging that they are of equal worth to ourselves and should be treated so?
