[Air-L] Researchers as new eyes on public data

[Lois Ann Scheidt]

Quoting Ed Lamoureux <ell at bumail.bradley.edu>:

> " journalists, politicians, preachers, bloggers,"  are NOT social
> scientific researchers responsible to that institutionalized ethic.
> They don't promise their universities (and the government and society
> in general) to protect human subjects. You are right, they can do
> anything they darn well please (within the confines of the ethics of
> their genre). We cannot. We promise to do better. And when we don't,
> we compromise the ability of future researchers to get willing
> subjects. We live and work in the speech act game called "social
> science research." It is bound by constraints that don't exit in some
> other language games.

I feel that this paragraph needs separate discussion, so I'm addressing 
most of it here rather then in my previous post.  The underlying issues 
here disturb me as much and probably more than those I see underlying 
my original question.

Setting the specifics of online research ethics aside for a second, why 
would one see social science researchers as inherently more "ethical" 
than "journalists, politicians, preachers"?  Why would "bloggers" be 
lumped unilaterally with these three professions?  Lots of 
professionals, including academics blog...many chronicle their personal 
lives and say little if anything about their professional work.

If I were to take this paragraph on face value it appears that social 
science researchers don't need professional level or disciplinary level 
ethical statements because our ethics would transcend any such 
document...I guess our ethics should be so high that both natural and 
academic language cannot encompass them.

The paragraph also implies that there is a one-size-fits-all answer 
that only unethical researchers would dispute - an issues that I 
commented on a couple of times in the previous ethics thread.  Those 
that worked on the original AoIR Ethics Statement had a significant 
mountain to climb to significantly encompass online research in one 
document, since "online research" is by no means a single discipline or 
method.

Personally, I work at cross-roads between a variety of disciplines 
including but not limited to - information science (often considered a 
non-social science), linguistics, cultural anthropology, communication, 
education, media studies, and performance studies (also often 
considered a non-social science).  Products of my research will range 
from classroom papers, to paper-only journals and edited volumes, as 
well as digital publications, and on to performance pieces.  I am a 
qualitative researcher whose work ranges from the more number heavy, 
statistical, end of the continuum all the way to autoethnographic work 
on the other.  I work with adult subjects (over 25 years of age), 
emerging adulthood (20-25) subjects, and adolescents (ages 10 -19).

I find it impossible to see how one research ethics statement or any 
single inherent ethical belief system can encompass all of my research 
with these diverse variables...and of course this list doesn't begin to 
capture the "ethical" and legal issues those of us who do geographical 
boundary spanning must at least consider when we design our studies.  
Legal systems vary around the world, as do ethical systems.

I completely agree that when we do research badly we may potentially 
injure the research that comes after us.  However in considering those 
future researchers, as well as our current participants, we need to be 
open to both the positives and negatives of any research 
project...including "protection" of participants, informed consent, and 
research design.

I readily admit that I have an underlying belief that shows through all 
of my discussion.  My belief is that by requiring "informed consent" 
for all social science research that we would limit researchers 
participant pools to those that will volunteer for a study.  Again that 
takes me very close to experimental research.  And while there is 
nothing at all wrong with experimental research as a method, I don't 
believe it gets us to the real hows and whys of human behavior.  I am 
an explanatory researcher, without the ability to study "in the wild" I 
might as well pack up my toys and go home.

Finally, I believe that we need to separate "ethical" discussions from 
"legal" ones.  Ethics underly laws, or at least we hope they do.  The 
one thing we can be sure of is that legal systems lag behind the 
cultural changes that drive and are driven by changes in ethical 
frameworks.  As educated people we should consider both and act as our 
good judgment, and the judgment of our peers through vetting, advises 
us to do...based on the specifics of our research environments, our 
methods, our subjects, and our professional spheres.  In my world there 
is on one-size-fits-all or even -most...of course that is true for most 
of my gray world not just my research life.

Lois Ann Scheidt

Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana
University, Bloomington IN USA

Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and
IUPUC, Columbus IN USA

Webpage:  http://www.loisscheidt.com
Blog:  http://www.professional-lurker.com