[Air-l] internet research and confidentiality

elijah wright elw at stderr.org
Tue Dec 21 08:29:05 PST 2004



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



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