[Air-L] research regs.

[Ed Lamoureux]

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.