| Internet Research Ethics Workshop Recap |
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| Featured |
| Written by Elizabeth |
| Thursday, 21 October 2010 03:32 |
 Wednesday, 20 October 2010, at the 11th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers pre-conference session, "Ethics and Internet Research Commons: Building a Sustainable Future," twenty-five scholars from the US, Sweden, England, Canada, Denmark, and Finland met to engage in an ongoing AoIR discussion around internet research ethics.
Ethical practice is an essential component of Internet research that seeks to be cross-cultural, globally sensitive, and sustainable. While each of us might conduct inquiry using an individual moral compass (as shaped by our own experiences and larger communities of practice), workshops like this help build a collaborative understanding of the ways in which we can ensure the rights of research participants. A collaborative, cross-cultural effort is crucial to protect not only our participants’ rights, but also our own rights as researchers, particularly as our efforts become more and more controlled by external governing agencies, such as Institutional Research Boards in the United States and various research ethics boards around the world.
The workshop's goals were to engage participants in a critical dialogue and discussion of cross-cultural, pluralistic approaches to ethics in Internet research and how these play out in practice on new and emerging technologies. Moreover, the participants examined how researchers might work through and with rather than against these differences to ensure that the participants of our studies are sufficiently protected and represented. In addition, the group sought to break down language surrounding research ethics such that it is not always divided by qualitative versus quantitative discourses.
Speakers included: Charles Ess, Alex Halavais, Annette Markham, Malin Svenningson, and Michael Zimmer.
Presentations were made on an array of topics, including:
How does cultural specificity define research ethics and regulation?
What constitutes a public text online and in what ways can and should they be used in research?
Why do we consider firewalls and passwords to be the "golden standard" for defining "private information?"
How do researchers work towards the imperative of sharing data while adhering to human subjects regulations?
What ethical guidelines should be applied to trace data?
How do researchers handle "closeness" in ethnography in ethical ways?
What oscillations take place when a researcher is first known as a member of a group and then as a researcher?
How is "empirical imperialism" affecting research ethics?
What are the virtues of deception?
The group then engaged in specific discussions of the above questions, with the goal of leaving the workshop with some best practices. There is an understanding that such best practices must be based on considerations of cultural, temporal, disciplinary, and methodological specificity.
Examples from the group’s best practices included:
1. In the written text, the researcher should situate or frame the context in a way that is most honest, true, authentic, to the researcher’s purpose and perspective.
2. Create an ethics board proposal that leaves open the most number of doors for promoting exploratory, inductive practice (noting that qualitative research takes longer, questions and methods change throughout the study)
3. In the beginning the researcher should explain the ethical plan and at the end, explain the ethical decisions.
4. It is possible and sometimes necessary to protect participants through the context through narrative and creative means, which may include fictionalizing or creating composite accounts.
5. Informed consent may happen at different points throughout a study, Sometimes it may be more ethical to get informed consent at the end when you want to present a specific case study or quote an individual or focus on a particular element. Therefore, informed consent should be always an inductive process.
6. Ethics always happens at different moments across research. Think about the research process—what are the critical junctures throughout the research? Consider the many points at which ethics emerges.
7. Consider carefully plans for data release: Representation of subjects can be through a composite or representative example.
Some general comments included:
1. Current attempts to anonymize data are too thin.
2. There is a realization that shared data may be less “useful” the more anonymized it is.
3. In regards to shared data, how responsible is the original researcher?
4. Can a researcher use data that was collected in ethically questionable way?
4. Researchers can use bad data in a good way?
5. What responsibilities exist around the responsible use of images? There are significant issues surrounding uncovering data about a subject/participant accidentally?
6. Collection of data via scraping leads to potential violations of terms of service. Is it ethically acceptable to violate a terms of service? If there is no material impact to the company, the research may be beneficial. (Not proprietary data, no identifiable data). If there is no other reasonable way to collect the data, violation of TOS may be an acceptable option of last resort. Boiler plate language, standards for companies to give researchers fair use of their data.
The workshop was facilitated by Elizabeth Buchanan, Anthony Hoffmann, and Jeremy Mauger, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation, project number 0924604. (Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation).
Please feel free to check out the presentations below! Slides from remaining presentaitons forthcoming... |
| Last Updated on Thursday, 28 October 2010 11:44 |
