One of my grad students used skype as it made it very easy to record the interviews (and was cheaper too of course - some of his interviewees were non-UK based). He then converted them to MP3s so he could replay them on iTunes & his ipod to transcribe (& reflect/ cogitate). We could think of no additional ethical considerations but did find that mp3 files have a habit of leaking - e.g. when iTunes auto-scans your laptop and pulls them all into your music library which then happens to be set to be shared on your local network... And also tells iLike & last.fm which interviews you are currently listening to/ transcribing. A bit problematic when the title of the track is the interviewee's name... So its important to label them with meaningless identifiers... and keep them away from things like iTunes. B On 14 Sep 2007, at 08:12, Jeremy Depauw wrote:
Hi all!
After having been sensibilzed by Nick Jankowski about ethics in Online research at the ECREA Summer School, I would like to ask a question to experienced scholars. I am considering to use skype to achieve telephone interviews in the course of my fieldwork, for my phd thesis.
May I consider Skype as yet-another telephonic device or do I have to achieve a deeper reflection regarding ethics? I am not pretty sure of all challenges involved in IP telephony, especially as I am about to interview competitive intelligence managers.
---- Dr Ben Anderson Deputy Director, Chimera, the Institute for Social and Technical Research University of Essex +44 (0) 7710 187 806 rss: http://istr.wordpress.com/feed web: http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/