[Air-L] research regs.
Ed Lamoureux
ell at bumail.bradley.edu
Sun Aug 12 05:17:54 PDT 2007
On Aug 11, 2007, at 11:50 PM, Marj Kibby wrote:
> I thought we were discussing textual analysis (of online texts) not
> ethnography. If I am analysing a public forum/blog/wiki,facebook
> site in which I do
> not intervene then no ethics clearance is necessary. It is a published
> document. If I question or comment in the forum only then does it
> become human
> subject research - I am intervening in their lives - but it would
> still
> qualify for expedited clearance as low-risk, being public.
>
> Marj
You make an interesting distinction here.
I'm sorry, but I do not accept it as an uncontested premise.
I've spent the last year rooting around in wikis and blogs written by
people with various medical conditions. One can try to say that I
could use data gathered there and treat it as public document for
textual analysis. One might even have an IRB that would buy it. But
if I publish material about what living people have said about their
heart disease, sexual disfunction, emotional distress, and
psychological disarray, and those materials are traceable to the
people who produced the data, and they weren't informed about my use
of the data that they produced, and they are personally identifiable
because one can track back the exemplars that I've published to those
individuals, I'll bet you dollars to donuts that there isn't an IRB
in the country that would (retrospectively) approve further research
like that, if they knew what was really going on. I'm sorry, but you
also won't convince me that it's ethical treatment of human subjects,
no matter how you parse what you want to call the records.
There's sometimes a pretty amorphous line between "documentary
textual analysis" and "qualitative social scientific research."
Neither intrudes with manipulations. In certain situations, QSSR gets
the same "pass" as does DTA. However, not without IRB review issuing
the exemption, first. One of my concerns is that from the sound of
some of the responses posted here, it sounds like there are some
online researchers would give themselves the pass without seeking
review, because they think their work just qualified for exemption
because of the way they interpret what they are doing. One of the
reasons we get IRBs involved in making decisions surrounding such
contested issues is that, sometimes, the researcher is NOT the best
judge as to what they should or should not be allowed or required to do.
Edward Lee Lamoureux, Ph. D.
More information about the Air-L
mailing list