On Aug 11, 2007, at 11:50 PM, Marj Kibby wrote:

I thought we were discussing textual analysis (of online texts) not ethnography. If I am analysing a public forum/blog/wiki,facebook site in which I do not intervene then no ethics clearance is necessary. It is a published document. If I question or comment in the forum only then does it become human subject research - I am intervening in their lives - but it would still qualify for expedited clearance as low-risk, being public.

Marj

You make an interesting distinction here. I'm sorry, but I do not accept it as an uncontested premise. I've spent the last year rooting around in wikis and blogs written by people with various medical conditions. One can try to say that I could use data gathered there and treat it as public document for textual analysis. One might even have an IRB that would buy it. But if I publish material about what living people have said about their heart disease, sexual disfunction, emotional distress, and psychological disarray, and those materials are traceable to the people who produced the data, and they weren't informed about my use of the data that they produced, and they are personally identifiable because one can track back the exemplars that I've published to those individuals, I'll bet you dollars to donuts that there isn't an IRB in the country that would (retrospectively) approve further research like that, if they knew what was really going on. I'm sorry, but you also won't convince me that it's ethical treatment of human subjects, no matter how you parse what you want to call the records. There's sometimes a pretty amorphous line between "documentary textual analysis" and "qualitative social scientific research." Neither intrudes with manipulations. In certain situations, QSSR gets the same "pass" as does DTA. However, not without IRB review issuing the exemption, first. One of my concerns is that from the sound of some of the responses posted here, it sounds like there are some online researchers would give themselves the pass without seeking review, because they think their work just qualified for exemption because of the way they interpret what they are doing. One of the reasons we get IRBs involved in making decisions surrounding such contested issues is that, sometimes, the researcher is NOT the best judge as to what they should or should not be allowed or required to do. Edward Lee Lamoureux, Ph. D.