Mostly Daren is right, but.... in the U.S. we have the classes of 'protected individuals' for which it doesn't necessarily matter if they published it, because as a 'protected individual' they may not have been publishing it even if they did. The classes of protected are generally as best as i am aware(and there are likely others): children/minors, people undergoing healthcare that may impinge their mental competence, people of diminished mental capacity, and military personnel. In those cases, people could publish, and actually not be publishing because they either don't have the capacity to understand or the right, so we just need to be careful. However, this has nothing to do with the expectation of privacy or being very personal, in those cases, if the person is not in a protected class, published is published. On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 9:31 PM, Brabham, Daren C <dbrabham@email.unc.edu>wrote:
I would even respectfully disagree about this line:
"Sometimes even when a blog is technically public, if it is about a very personal matter (like illness, or family) there is an expectation of privacy/anonymity even when the blog is publicly accessible. In those cases I could understand going with pseudonyms, but not with blogs about indie music."
The act of publication is to make public a set of ideas, and at that point it becomes an artifact--a text--game for analysis without the concern of human subject research ethics (in my opinion). Again, if the authors attempt to password-protect their work, that's an IRB-worthy issue, but otherwise, even if it's about a "personal matter," the act of publication is a public thing...thus no IRB needed.
db
--- Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D. Assistant Professor School of Journalism & Mass Communication University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Carroll Hall, CB 3365 Chapel Hill, NC 27599 (919) 962-0676 (office) (801) 633-4796 (cell) daren.brabham@unc.edu www.darenbrabham.com _______________________________________________ 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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