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

Lois Ann Scheidt lscheidt at indiana.edu
Fri Sep 14 08:40:52 PDT 2007


My biggest concern with the transition you outlined is potential access 
to the material by people outside the project.  This tends to be a 
storage issue...every piece of digital equipment used to store 
interview data should be locked down and access limited to only those 
involved with the project.  Plus the iPOD should not be one that gets 
carried around to listen to either the recorded interviews or music.

I can see how the conversion to MP3 is useful but the iPOD part makes 
me more than a bit nervous.  I do think that our data should be easy 
for us to use, but not so "easy" that anyone can get a hold of it.  I 
guess if they are using the iPOD in a secure place (no I don't mean a 
vault, though our IRB frowns on identified data being stored or used in 
dorm rooms) and then it is locked up when not being used for the 
project...I can probably live with it.

I've been playing with some freeware that encrypts a virtual drive 
(http://www.newsoftwares.net/folderlock/).  I'm questing now in 
planning for protecting voice and text interviews for my dissertation.  
So far I am impressed, it even has a master password so you can unlock 
any of your locked files if you forget folder specific passwords.  
Personally I locked the first level folder and didn't mess with 
individual locks.  I reserve the right to change that decision at a 
later date.

I should note that there has been a lot of conversation on an IRB 
listserv I receive, that leads me to believe data encryption 
requirements are around the corner for many large research institutions 
in the U.S.  In short so many laptops are being used and carried around 
by the researchers...just watch the mass media to see examples of 
access issues related to stolen and lost laptops.  I'm trying to learn 
the technologies before I'm told I have to do use them...I would 
recommend the same to those on this list.

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


Quoting Ben Anderson <benander at essex.ac.uk>:

> 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
> rss: http://istr.wordpress.com/feed
> web: http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/
>
>
>
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