[Air-L] Ethics considerations in usage of skype for telephone interviews

[Ben Anderson]

One of my grad students used skype as it made it very easy to record  
the interviews (and was cheaper too of course - some of his  
interviewees were non-UK based). He then converted them to MP3s so he  
could replay them on iTunes & his ipod to transcribe (& reflect/ 
cogitate).

We could think of no additional ethical considerations but did find  
that mp3 files have a habit of leaking - e.g. when iTunes auto-scans  
your laptop and pulls them all into your music library which then  
happens to be set to be shared on your local network... And also  
tells iLike & last.fm which interviews you are currently listening to/ 
transcribing. A bit problematic when the title of the track is the  
interviewee's name...

So its important to label them with meaningless identifiers... and  
keep them away from things like iTunes.

B

On 14 Sep 2007, at 08:12, Jeremy Depauw wrote:

> Hi all!
>
> After having been sensibilzed by Nick Jankowski about ethics in Online
> research at the ECREA Summer School, I would like to ask a question to
> experienced scholars. I am considering to use skype to achieve
> telephone interviews in the course of my fieldwork, for my phd thesis.
>
> May I consider Skype as yet-another telephonic device or do I have to
> achieve a deeper reflection regarding ethics? I am not pretty sure of
> all challenges involved in IP telephony, especially as I am about to
> interview competitive intelligence managers.


----
Dr Ben Anderson
Deputy Director,
Chimera, the Institute for Social and Technical Research
University of Essex
+44 (0) 7710 187 806
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