Dear Pawan,
From an digital ethnograpy perspective you might want to go beyond ´lurking´ the online data and try to establish credibility as well as insider perspectives on identity construction by contacting the respondents and set up interviews in an offline context? For some interesting perspectives on ethnicity & id construction in cyberspace see Nakamura (2007) Digitizing Race. Also you might want to look in the archive of this mailinglist on a recent rich discussion (July-August I think) on qualitative methods for studying the Internet.
Kind regards, Koen Leurs | Aio / PhD student OGC | Utrecht University, the Netherlands | Janskerkhof 13, 3512 BL Utrecht | # 2.02 | (+31) 30 253 78 59 | (+31) 6 13108803 | www.uu.nl/wiredup Please consider the environment before printing this email. ________________________________ Van: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org namens Pawan Singh Verzonden: vr 19-9-2008 2:14 Aan: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Onderwerp: [Air-L] Suggestions on ethics of using online data for academic research Hi, I am Pawan Singh, a PhD. student in Communication at UC, San Diego. I am currently working on a paper that looks at questions of identity construction and performance online by gay men in the Indian context. I am basically looking at some of the user profiles on a popular dating/hook-up site used by gay men to understand how they self-construct identity and form relationships in this space. I understand that the data on these profiles is private even though it's in a public space. When I chose some profiles using purposive sampling, I contacted the users for their consent. Very few responded while others dismissed the research as hoax. I am investigating how I can go ahead and produce an virtual ethnographic analysis based on this profiles in an ethical fashion. I could change the names of the user profiles but does that suffice? If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. It'll be a great help. Thanks, Pawan Singh _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/