Brooke, I am also in the process of working on my dissertation, which uses online sources and references. There are two distinct issues in doing this kind of research, ethics and legality. With regard to legal implications, I would suggest contacted your academic institutions board of ethical research. Most such boards include at least some legal experts who can help you make decisions about legality directly relevant to your field and your region. Now on to ethics, I think its best to go back to basics with this. One of the earliest and most important concepts most of us learn about research is to protect your informants. This means not only protecting offline information but protecting their online identity as well. The specifics of how to do that will depend on the exact nature of your project. Whenever I conduct research, I firmly believe that my first duty is to make sure that my research subjects are not harmed by my research. That being said, I think that getting the permission of the bloggers themselves and offering a psudonym is a good start. However, I don't think that its entirely necessary to get consent from each respondants. Here's why. A bloggers response is a semi-public forum. If you treat Internet spaces like a document, then is akin to a "letter to the editor" in a newspaper. If on the other hand you view Internet spaces in a more post-modern light, and see it as a location. Then it is a public venue, a place where ethical rules of observation or participant observation in a public space function. I do however, suggest that you ask your bloggers to notify their readership that they are particpation in your research. While it may somewhat influence the behavior, I think that outing yourself as a researcher fulfills you ethical obligations... Just my humble opinion. Alecea --- brook bolander <brookbolander@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear AOIR,
I am writing my PhD on the subject of "power in blogs", and thereby exploring how power is negotiated in the interaction between bloggers and their readers, and between the readers themselves in the comments sections of blog posts in which conflicts are salient. I have received an initial e-mail confirmation from the bloggers that they consent to my research and have given them the option of requiring me to use psuedonyms. I now intend to write to the bloggers, asking for their addresses, so I can outline the project in more detail and obtain written consent.
I am aware, however, that research on the internet can be very complicated in terms of ethical issues. What I am less sure about are the legal issues. Am I correct in assuming that if I do not include quotations, use pseudonyms for the readers (whose permission I have not gained), use pseudonyms for those bloggers who ask me to (one blogger has explicitly asked me not to), gain written consent from the bloggers themselves and inform them in the letter what the study entails, that I will run into no ethical or legal problems? All my bloggers state they are adults.
Or do I need to write to the hosts as well, like blogger, for example, to ask for their permission as well?
One of the bloggers asked me whether she would have any problems vis à vis her readers if she consented to my study, for example, and I found I didn't really know, with any certainty, what to reply.
I hope that my PhD will be published in a couple of years, and am not sure whether that plays a role in terms of its label as something for 'commerical purposes'. I am writing my PhD in Switzerland.
I really want to go about this the right way and am having problems gaining the information I need.
Thanks a lot in advance for your help, Best wishes Brook Bolander _______________________________________________ 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
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