[Air-l] FW: [Ethics] public mailing list

[Charles Ess]

I happily pass this on from Amy Bruckman...

Charles Ess
Director, Interdisciplinary Studies Center
Drury University
900 N. Benton Ave.                          Voice: 417-873-7230
Springfield, MO  65802  USA            FAX: 417-873-7435
Home page:  http://www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html
Co-chair, CATaC 2002: http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/~sudweeks/catac02/
"...to be non-violent, we must not wish for anything on this earth which the
meanest and lowest of human beings cannot have." -- Gandhi

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From: "Amy S. Bruckman" <asb at cc.gatech.edu>
Reply-To: ethics at aoir.org
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 10:32:21 -0400
To: ethics at aoir.org
Subject: [Ethics] public mailing list


If anyone's interested, I've set up a new public mailing list for
discussion of these issues. (If someone could please forward this to
the AoIR public lists, I'd appreciate it--I'm not on any of those lists.)
-- Amy

------- Forwarded Message

Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 10:20:15 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: New mailing list: online-research-ethics

If you're interested in joining the new online-research-ethics mailing
list:

mail:     majordomo at cc.gatech.edu
place in the message body:  subscribe online-research-ethics

A quick intro to the issue:
I've been doing some work on trying to development guidelines for ethical
research online.  I'm part of working groups from APA and AoIR to develop
formal policies.  There are lots of thorny issues.  Here's an example of
a controversial situation: studying discourse in chatrooms.

View 1: "A chat room is like a public square"
Linguists reserve the right to record dialog in public places and
study its formal properties. They can take notes or even tape record
conversations say in a park. They don't need consent for this.
Identity of subjects is disguised. Many linguists argue that open
Internet chatrooms are an analogous situation, and they can record
whatever they like and analyze it without acknowledging their
presence.

View 2: "A chat room is like my living room"
Others argue that because chat rooms are normally not recorded, participants
have a reasonable expectation that discourse there is ephemeral. You
can't record it without permission.  You can't make individuals be subjects
in an experimental study without their freely-given informed consent.


Messy, no? Join the mailing list for more. The list is open to anyone.
Especially welcome are:

* Individuals seeking advice on their own research
* Members or IRBs struggling to handle research proposals

The list is "off the record"--you may not quote postings from it without
written permission of the author.  I hope this will help foster free
discussion.

Please feel free to forward this message to interested people, and post
it to appropriate lists.

- -- Amy


------- End of Forwarded Message


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