[Air-l] ethnography and ethics

Thomas Koenig T.Koenig at lboro.ac.uk
Wed May 5 20:42:43 PDT 2004


At 01:49 06/05/2004, you wrote:
>There are almost no situations in social/behavioral research where 
>"covert" methods are ethical.

I know that there is a lot of talk about ethics and even more regulations 
these days, but bar a few cases where extraordinarily vulnarable people are 
involved (young children, persons with illnesses of various sorts, etc.), I 
cannot see, why "covert" research on the internet should be "off-limits"? 
Most activity on the internet is public, even if some people are not aware 
of that fact.

>The only situations where deception (as in hiding of any sort) should even 
>be considered must meet two basic conditions.
>
>First, there must be a significant benefit to society and/or the participants.

And who is going to say, what is beneficial to society?

>The second condition is that the actual research intentions and methods 
>must be fully disclosed after the necessary data is discovered. This means 
>that you cannot tell people you are selling them software and then later 
>tell them you are actually testing their IQ.  Instead, it means that you 
>can tell them you are testing their IQ and then later tell them you are 
>actually testing their ability to buy software.  That is a big difference.

I agree, if you are doing questionaires that's a different story, but for 
"ethnography" different rules should apply.

>But again--that sort of research really only should be done when it 
>significantly benefits society.  And those kind of benefits do not 
>typically come under social science research projects about social norms 
>and such.  The best counter argument to this I have heard is, of course, 
>social scientists don't risk much when they do research . . . . but I 
>would argue that "secretly" observing people online makes all online 
>research harder to do because when people feel spied on they tend to be 
>less interested in working with researchers. Take the real world case of 
>some native American groups who now tightly control (and for very good 
>reason) researchers among them precisely because of the failures in ethics 
>on the part of some academics.

I think this is a very tenuous analogy. If you research people in their 
private settings, of course, you will have to adhere to very scrupulous 
rules. But if you are observing persons in a public space, as is Usenet, 
un-moderated Listservers, much of IRC, web forums, etc., why should you be 
more liable than, say, journalists, whose work has usually much more severe 
consequences to those observed?

I am currently doing research on Antisemitism on the Net. If I were to tell 
persons I observe in webfori that I am doing research on their *publicly 
available* communications, my data would be pretty useless. If people make 
publicly antisemitic statements in the public, should I "warn" them that I 
might quote them? Protection of one group can also result into a higher 
vulnerabilty of a different group.

If, as a consequence, people would indeed shy away from public antisemitic 
statements in the future (which I doubt, after all, how many people read 
sociology journals?), that might be an obstacle for future research. But if 
I (or anybody else) were to delurk, my (or anybody else's) research results 
would have very little validity.

Again, if very vulnerable persons are involved, things look different, but 
much of research in sociology (unlike psychology) is *not* concerned with 
vulnerable groups.

One more point: In most countries, where social research on the net is 
conducted, penal codes against intrusion into privacy, defamation, etc. 
exist. Why should the not democratically legitimated research community be 
liable decide what is ethical and what is not?

Thomas

-- 
thomas koenig
department of social sciences, loughborough university
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/staff/thomas/index.html 





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