[Air-l] Great Ethical disasters in Internet Research?

[Annette Markham]

I'm perhaps joining the conversation after the rain has ended....and 
because the weather in Chicago is so hot, the air conditioning prompts me 
to stay indoors and write long-winded replies...

I heartily agree with you, Chris (and others in this thread) that a 
researcher's methodological decisions are vitally connected to the ethics 
of the project.

Brainstorming here, every phase in the research project entails choices 
that are simultaneously method and ethics choices, where the well-intended 
researcher can make decisions that have serious ethical consequences, both 
to the participants being studied and research colleagues.  Some of these 
decision points:

I.  The choice about accessing the data.  This decision involves, among 
other things, preserving rights of participants and is a methodological choice.

II.  The choice of data collection tool is an ethical choice--how to 
capture the stuff of experience later called "data."  Here, the researcher 
will make choices that necessarily abstract experience.  One ethical issue 
is the extent to which the abstraction is a good representation ("good" 
meaning many things, of course, ethically speaking).

One's discipline helps to dictate but does not completely determine the 
rules of conduct about how one approaches the participants.  For example, 
the fields of psychology, linguistics, and ethnography each have their own 
ideas (theories, standard practices, rules of thumb...), but the 
interdisciplinary nature of Internet Studies allows much blending of 
approaches/tools/theories.  Practically speaking, this means a researcher 
has license to pick and choose from many traditions, and each choice has 
ethical consequences.

III.  Choice of tool to analyze the data:  The process of making sense of 
the stuff later called data is a series of choices which are ethical 
choices, through and through.

As we interpret, people's experiences are thematized, categorized, 
excerpted, generalized, etc.  The result of empirical studies inform future 
studies, build theory.  Put heavily, every choice we make as individual 
researchers informs future knowledge.  Seemingly simple choices are never 
value free or morally neutral.

IV.  Writing Conventions:  Choices about how the participants are framed, 
active versus passive researcher voice.....depending on who the researcher 
is writing for, the report will change.  The results may also shift, 
depending on the purpose/audience.

V.  More writing/editing decisions: Choices about what is absent/omitted 
from the research report.  What got left out?  Omissions have consequences 
for knowledge production, and the decisions are tied up with both method 
traditions and ethics (voice of the participants, data that might be 
unfavorable for the researcher's question/results, the researcher's own 
experiences that influenced the study from beginning to end)

So, as you imply, your request for "great ethical disasters" is complicated 
by the fact that one could question the ethics of a study at multiple 
points of the project.  Mary Gray's "tangent" thread is an example of how 
one is compelled to critique the ethics of research based on criteria that 
doesn't fall into the obvious (more discussed) category of violating rights 
of participants at the outset of the project.

.....I guess this is a long winded way of saying:  I think the *disasters* 
are important, but just as important (the word "insidious" comes to mind) 
are the seemingly minor transgressions, dismissed because they are *just* 
methodology choices (not ethically based) or even non-decisions because the 
researcher's discipline requires adherence to certain procedures (therefore 
not subject to interrogation/reflection).

Annette