[Air-l] consent for asynchronous qualitative email interviews withinternational participants

[Kristin R. Wolfe]

I believe that an email interview may not get past the ethics review
because the name of the participant would be tied to the email. However,
you may be able to set up a "blind" online survey that would allow you to
collect the data. Also, this "blind" survey would allow you to get more
accurate, i.e. less likely to "fudge" information because their name is
tied to it. In order to insure that only those invited to participate do
so, and that they only respond once, you could send each participant a
code which would be entered at the beginning of the survey. It would not
be able to be re-entered at any point in time, once the survey was
submitted, and should allow you more honest research.
-- 
Kristin Roeschenthaler Wolfe
Adjunct Professor
Duquesne University

> I am a PhD candidate and I am preparing for my ethics application to
> conduct
> interviews by email in the area of women's sexual health (ie 'sensitive'
> topic). From the literature there seem to be a variety of acceptable
> options
> with regard to consent, from tacit agreement inherent in the decision to
> participate through to a variety of procedures to obtain some form of
> consent documentation. As I am interviewing an international rather than
> local group of participants, obtaining a hard copy by post or fax is
> problematic in terms of reimbursement of participants and in terms of
> dissuading people from this extra step in participation. I would be very
> appreciative if anyone could update me on practices that are currently
> deemed acceptable. The main text I am working from in terms of ethics is
> Mann & Stewart 2000 'Internet communication and qualitative research: A
> handbook for researching online.'
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Catherine Cook
>
>
>
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