[Air-L] Online research ethics

[Lois Ann Scheidt]

I agree and I disagree.  If you are making inferences about 
academia...an institution with people and infrastructure, etc...then I 
totally agree.  However, if you are using the text to get at 
information about bloggers as a collective...then I don't agree.  I 
would also disagree if your inferences were toward people as 
academics...but that might be personal too.  *w*

I think one could do citation analysis without IRB approval...though I 
don't know the actual history of that form of research...because the 
real unit of analysis is the citation.  What I see happen most often in 
these discussion is that the online presence of text, pics, etc is 
being used as an access point to
infer about the humans using the technology...that's human subjects 
research because the real unit of analysis is the person not the online 
text, pics, whatever.  The online content is an access point to gather 
information about the people.

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 Jeremy Hunsinger <jhuns at vt.edu>:

>>
> Well yes and no, then the question becomes one of what you are saying
> about what.  This is a slippery slope because one can always argue
> that if the creator of something is still alive... you are studying
> people and I think we should explicitly avoid implication that
> studying people makes any given individual a research subject.   There
> are a myriad of ways of studying people without fitting the
> description of a research subject in the u.s. guidelines (which is not
> as rich and  plural as many humanist might wish, but ehh....).  The
> situation in the u.s. as i've read it makes people a subject when you
> intervene, when you invade privacy, or when you might risk harm (harm
> in a way that is substantially more and different from the everyday.)
>
> I do agree that if you aren't sure whether you are subject to irb
> approval, you should get irb approval.   But I don't think we should
> argue that studying blogs archived on the web and making inferences
> from their produced textual materials about bloggers in general is
> any different than when i study books and publications in order to
> make inferences about the operations of academia.  Now, if i were to
> study a blog to understand one person's life that might be an issue,
> and it would depend signficantly on the methods you undertake as to
> where my opinion would lie.
>
>>
>> If you are studying the site(s) as texts without consideration to the
>> issues of the people who wrote the words, placed the pictures,
>> etc....then I think you can use the text argument.  HOWEVER, if you
>> are
>> using the words or pictures or whatever, on the screen to get at
>> issues
>> related to the content creators then you are studying people.  PERIOD.
>
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