[Air-l] Final draft - aoir ethics working committee

[Charles Ess]

Colleagues:

I'm very pleased to call your attention to the final draft of the document,
"Ethical decision-making and Internet research: Recommendations from the
aoir ethics working committee."

<http://www.aoir.org/reports/DraftFIVE.html>

This document articulates our best overview of the main range of ethical
issues characteristic of the diverse venues and approaches to Internet
research.    
    It emphasizes first of all the importance of the extant ethical codes
and guidelines already in place for the various disciplines at work in
Internet research.  At the same time, of course, the ethical situation is
complicated by the realities that online research often differs in crucial
ways from offline research - and that Internet research often implicates
more than one discipline, each of which may invoke different, sometimes
conflicting ethical assumptions.  As well, our ethical decisions always take
place in the context of national legal and ethical traditions: in
particular, our document highlights the agreements and contrasts between
U.S. and European Union law and ethical approaches.
    The range of issues and the diversity of pertinent disciplinary codes,
ethical frameworks, and national legal and ethical traditions may make the
possibility of resolving specific ethical challenges seem an impossible
task.  Nonetheless, as we have worked through specific issues, case studies,
and the pertinent literature, we have discerned that it is quite possible -
up to a point, at least - to clarify and resolve at least many of the more
common ethical difficulties.
    Such resolution, in part, depends on recognizing the legitimacy of more
than one ethical framework  (whether as stressed by a specific discipline or
national legal / ethical tradition) in attempting to resolve ethical issues
- and thereby, the ethical defensibility of more than one response to a
given issue.  In philosophical ethics, this is referred to as ethical
pluralism - a middle ground between some dogmatic insistence on a single
right answer, and an ethical relativism that says "anything goes."
    
In addition to stressing ethical pluralism, our document further emphasizes:
    * awareness of and sensitivity to cross-cultural contrasts (helped in
part by the fact that the committee itself is made up of ethicists and
researchers from a variety of disciplines and countries); and
    * ethics _is_ a matter of guidelines, applied through judgment honed by
experience to specific situations and contexts - not "recipes" for
algorithmically deducing _the_ correct ethical answer.

In an effort to illustrate such pluralism at work, our document shows how to
apply several different ethical decision-making frameworks to characteristic
issues - in part, through the inclusion of several "ethical protocols" or
question lists that aim to uncover the important ethical dimensions of a
research project. 

To quote the Prologue:

*This document - as it synthesizes the results of our nearly two years¹ of
work together - is intended to aid both researchers from a variety of
disciplines and those responsible for insuring that this research adhere to
legal and ethical requirements in their work of clarifying and resolving
ethical issues encounter in online research.*

On behalf of the aoir ethics working committee, I commend this document to
your careful consideration.  Ideally, we would ask that aoir members raise
whatever substantive criticisms and suggestions you would like to make on
the aoir list, so that we can work through those and modify the document
accordingly _prior_ to its presentation to the aoir membership in Maastricht
for (we hope) approval.  Of course, aoir-ists (a tense in classical Greek?)
are also invited to send comments and suggestions off-list to me and/or any
of the members of the ethics working committee.

I here also want to express my profound thanks to the members of the
committee for their diligence, insight, wisdom, and humor as we have
wrestled with these issues and materials over the past months.  The
committee includes:

Poline Bala ­ Malaysia;
Amy Bruckman ­ USA;
Sarina Chen - USA; 
Brenda Danet ­ Israel/USA;
Dag Elgesem ­ Norway;
Andrew Feenberg - USA;
Stine Gotved ­ Denmark;
Christine M. Hine ­ UK;
Soraj Hongladarom - Thailand;
Jeremy Hunsinger - USA;
Klaus Jensen - Denmark;
Storm King - USA; 
Chris Mann - UK; 
Helen Nissenbaum - USA;
Kate O¹Riordan - UK;
Paula Roberts - Australia;
Wendy Robinson - USA;
Leslie Shade - Canada;
Malin Sveningson - Sweden;
Leslie Tkach - Japan;
John Weckert - Australia.

I would also like to thank several aoir members (cited in the document) who
pointed us towards important resources, etc.

Looking forward to the discussion!

Cheers and all best wishes,

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/

Education is what is left over after you've forgotten everything that you've
learned.  (source unknown)