Dear List Members, I was hoping I could get some feedback on an ethical issue that I am trying to work through with my dissertation commitee. I am conducting community and social network research with a group online. Essentially, the group is a collection of fiction writer hobbists, who write and then 'publish" their work online. They publish in a variety of venues, including personal websites, story archives and public liveJournals. The interesting data (for me) is in the form of their authors notes, where the talk to and about other members of their group and somewhat in their feedback, which is sometimes posted with the stories. The dilemma is this. How do I consider this group with regard to informed consent. I have three different sets of recommendations 1) One of my advisors argues that the group is posting on public websites and explicitly states that their stories are for public consumption, so should be treated as document data and cited using standard citation practices for blogs and websites. 2) A second advisor disagrees and argues that the group should be considered individual subjects, including requests of permission to use statements, pseudonyms for screen names and perhaps even consent forms of some sort. 3) A third person says that no, it should be treated as participant observation, that I should inform members that I am using data from the authors notes and feedback but not require consent forms. Specifically, since the participants use screenames and thus are unlikely to want to give me access to their real names. Their "real" names are anonymous, so I should focus on how to protect or not their screen names... What do you all think about the issue? Should I contact the authors and not use the feedback, which sometimes comes from people "outside" the core group? Should I treat it like document websites? I am really torn about what the ethical thing to do here is. Alecea Standlee MA. MA. PhD Student. Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship Department of Sociology ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs