Quoting Ed Lamoureux <ell@bumail.bradley.edu>:
" journalists, politicians, preachers, bloggers," are NOT social scientific researchers responsible to that institutionalized ethic. They don't promise their universities (and the government and society in general) to protect human subjects. You are right, they can do anything they darn well please (within the confines of the ethics of their genre). We cannot. We promise to do better. And when we don't, we compromise the ability of future researchers to get willing subjects. We live and work in the speech act game called "social science research." It is bound by constraints that don't exit in some other language games.
I feel that this paragraph needs separate discussion, so I'm addressing most of it here rather then in my previous post. The underlying issues here disturb me as much and probably more than those I see underlying my original question. Setting the specifics of online research ethics aside for a second, why would one see social science researchers as inherently more "ethical" than "journalists, politicians, preachers"? Why would "bloggers" be lumped unilaterally with these three professions? Lots of professionals, including academics blog...many chronicle their personal lives and say little if anything about their professional work. If I were to take this paragraph on face value it appears that social science researchers don't need professional level or disciplinary level ethical statements because our ethics would transcend any such document...I guess our ethics should be so high that both natural and academic language cannot encompass them. The paragraph also implies that there is a one-size-fits-all answer that only unethical researchers would dispute - an issues that I commented on a couple of times in the previous ethics thread. Those that worked on the original AoIR Ethics Statement had a significant mountain to climb to significantly encompass online research in one document, since "online research" is by no means a single discipline or method. Personally, I work at cross-roads between a variety of disciplines including but not limited to - information science (often considered a non-social science), linguistics, cultural anthropology, communication, education, media studies, and performance studies (also often considered a non-social science). Products of my research will range from classroom papers, to paper-only journals and edited volumes, as well as digital publications, and on to performance pieces. I am a qualitative researcher whose work ranges from the more number heavy, statistical, end of the continuum all the way to autoethnographic work on the other. I work with adult subjects (over 25 years of age), emerging adulthood (20-25) subjects, and adolescents (ages 10 -19). I find it impossible to see how one research ethics statement or any single inherent ethical belief system can encompass all of my research with these diverse variables...and of course this list doesn't begin to capture the "ethical" and legal issues those of us who do geographical boundary spanning must at least consider when we design our studies. Legal systems vary around the world, as do ethical systems. I completely agree that when we do research badly we may potentially injure the research that comes after us. However in considering those future researchers, as well as our current participants, we need to be open to both the positives and negatives of any research project...including "protection" of participants, informed consent, and research design. I readily admit that I have an underlying belief that shows through all of my discussion. My belief is that by requiring "informed consent" for all social science research that we would limit researchers participant pools to those that will volunteer for a study. Again that takes me very close to experimental research. And while there is nothing at all wrong with experimental research as a method, I don't believe it gets us to the real hows and whys of human behavior. I am an explanatory researcher, without the ability to study "in the wild" I might as well pack up my toys and go home. Finally, I believe that we need to separate "ethical" discussions from "legal" ones. Ethics underly laws, or at least we hope they do. The one thing we can be sure of is that legal systems lag behind the cultural changes that drive and are driven by changes in ethical frameworks. As educated people we should consider both and act as our good judgment, and the judgment of our peers through vetting, advises us to do...based on the specifics of our research environments, our methods, our subjects, and our professional spheres. In my world there is on one-size-fits-all or even -most...of course that is true for most of my gray world not just my research life. Lois Ann Scheidt Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington IN USA Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and IUPUC, Columbus IN USA Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com