internet research and confidentiality
Hello, I am now in the middle of filling out an IRB form for research that I intend to do on blogging practices, and it seems that any research done on "human subjects" must keep personally identifying information confidential. This is a difficult issue, since one's username and blog title would identify an individual, but they may also be understood as published/public information. If anyone has encountered a similar situation and can advise as to how I should proceed or who can offer research references that deal with this issue, that would be much appreciated. Take care, Oriana Gatta Women's Studies M.A. candidate Georgia State University
Our IRB here (Indiana University) has taken the stance, with some coaxing from us, of considering weblogs public information - and thus not requiring any anonymization whatsoever. You should probably be prepared to fend off an angry message or two from bloggers who do not appreciate that you're using their blog in your research; people will probably figure out that something's going on from reading their referer logs. If you think that it would help, I think we could probably share the language we used in our last IRB applications in order to address just this issue. My personal understanding of the situation is that the information is public, but that you should certainly treat individuals with as much care and as ethically as possible. For our purposes (largely examination of genre characteristics and coding of features) the characteristics of individuals do not often seem to pose a problem, but for many types of study (for example, a piece of research that discusses blogging about sexual orientation or drug use) there may be repercussions for the studied blogger that need to be taken into very careful consideration. --elijah IU SLIS / Blog Research on Genre project http://www.blogninja.com
I am now in the middle of filling out an IRB form for research that I intend to do on blogging practices, and it seems that any research done on "human subjects" must keep personally identifying information confidential. This is a difficult issue, since one's username and blog title would identify an individual, but they may also be understood as published/public information. If anyone has encountered a similar situation and can advise as to how I should proceed or who can offer research references that deal with this issue, that would be much appreciated.
Take care, Oriana Gatta Women's Studies M.A. candidate Georgia State University
At 10:18 AM 12/21/2004, you wrote:
Hello, I am now in the middle of filling out an IRB form for research that I intend to do on blogging practices, and it seems that any research done on "human subjects" must keep personally identifying information confidential. This is a difficult issue, since one's username and blog title would identify an individual, but they may also be understood as published/public information. If anyone has encountered a similar situation and can advise as to how I should proceed or who can offer research references that deal with this issue, that would be much appreciated. Take care, Oriana Gatta Women's Studies M.A. candidate Georgia State University
Almost ALL of us have encountered this situation, Oriana. It is made all the more difficult by the fact that, even if you devise pseudonyms to protect your subjects, a simple Google search will turn up the original blog and the identity will be revealed. As you work through this struggle with your IRB, I strongly suggest that you consult the AoIR ethics guidelines, which may be found at http://aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf There are no simple solutions here, just difficult decisions that you (and your IRB) must make. ------ Mark D. Johns, Ph.D. Asst. Professor of Communication/Linguistics, Luther College, Decorah, Iowa http://faculty.luther.edu/~johnsmar/ ----------------------------------------------- "Get the facts first. You can distort them later." ---Mark Twain
At 16:39 21/12/2004, you wrote:
At 10:18 AM 12/21/2004, you wrote:
Hello, I am now in the middle of filling out an IRB form for research that I intend to do on blogging practices, and it seems that any research done on "human subjects" must keep personally identifying information confidential. This is a difficult issue, since one's username and blog title would identify an individual, but they may also be understood as published/public information.
Almost ALL of us have encountered this situation, Oriana. It is made all the more difficult by the fact that, even if you devise pseudonyms to protect your subjects, a simple Google search will turn up the original blog and the identity will be revealed. As you work through this struggle with your IRB, I strongly suggest that you consult the AoIR ethics guidelines, which may be found at http://aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf There are no simple solutions here, just difficult decisions that you (and your IRB) must make.
We had this issue a while ago on this list, and I just want to repeat my view: Blogging, Webpublishing and Usenet posting are demonstrably public activities. Unless you render the concept of "private" so ambigious that it becomes virtually unusable, this is an empirical fact, not a normative statement. Therefore, publishing research on these kinds of communications does not violate any privacy/confidentialty laws. At least that is the case for most countries that guarantee some freedom of speech rights. While I have no idea about the bylaws of specific universities or professional associations, I would strongly caution against regulations that curtail the rights of academics vis-a-vis non-affiliated citizens or even journalists. Of course, some exceptions with respect to vulnerable persons apply, but by and large vulnerable persons do not do blogging. BTW, you are not doing (experimental) research on human subjects, but on communications. Thomas -- thomas koenig, ph.d. department of social sciences, loughborough university http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/staff/thomas/index.html
Ogatta, a series of questions/answers/discussion overview on weblog research ethics (my own research + practices of other weblog researchers): http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/27.html#a1188 http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/29.html#a1191 http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/05/16.html#a1209 Once you are there you may want to check comments and "links from other blogs" for these posts. So far my choices are the following: - I do not ask permissions prior to the study (but I study my own blogging community and I blog about it, so most of bloggers I study know it :) - I usually ask permissions for using real names, quotes from weblogs and providing permalinks if I treat weblog content as a data (= to say something about individuals, their relations or interactions). I do not do it when referring to a weblog post as a reference. Of course, there is a grey area in between... One of important reasons to ask for a permission to link to/quote someone's weblog is not the privacy as such (as weblogs are public anyway), but exposing a blogger to a potentially wider audience than it would be without "research spotlight". It could be a case that particular blogger doesn't like such publicity and I'd respect this choice. And, as a side note, I'm working on a document outlining weblog research challenges (ethics is one of them), drop me a line in private if you think that reading draft version could be helpful in your research. Lilia Efimova blog.mathemagenic.com On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 11:18:58 -0500, Oriana Solta Gatta <ogatta1@student.gsu.edu> wrote:
Hello, I am now in the middle of filling out an IRB form for research that I intend to do on blogging practices, and it seems that any research done on "human subjects" must keep personally identifying information confidential. This is a difficult issue, since one's username and blog title would identify an individual, but they may also be understood as published/public information. If anyone has encountered a similar situation and can advise as to how I should proceed or who can offer research references that deal with this issue, that would be much appreciated. Take care, Oriana Gatta Women's Studies M.A. candidate Georgia State University
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participants (5)
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elijah wright -
Lilia Efimova -
Mark D. Johns -
Oriana Solta Gatta -
Thomas Koenig