[Air-L] Online research ethics

[dddumitr at ucalgary.ca]

Together with a colleague of mine, we are doing an autoethnographic
research project in SL. Ethics has been a major issue since the very
beginning. We are not doing research of other people/avatars, but our own
understanding of things and our reflexive processes are inevitably formed
in an interactional manner. We have asked for the opinion  of the ethics
committee in our department/school, and they have argued that since this
is autoethnographic, we actually need ethics applications in relation to
each other (since our project is collaborative and we share our personal
experiences).

In my mind, the discussion about ethics in SL is no different from ethics
in RL. For instance, would you ask for consent if you do an observation in
a public place? Going to public places in SL (even if you require an
account to come in) - how is it substantially different in ethical terms
than doing an observation in RL? I think these issues are hard to answer
and require a case-by-case decision. In environments such as SL, doing any
type of research that takes as its subject other avatars and their
behavior, requires ethics procedures, in my view. I feel ambivalent
however in arguing that you need to ask for permission if you do a content
analysis of the posters in SL, or of blog posts. Would you ask for
permission if you want to do research on someone's personal correspondence
or diary, but would you do the same if that correspondence would be
published in a book? On the other side, do bloggers have an expectation
that their stuff is 'public' (some do, some may not - so what do you do in
such cases?).

Delia Dumitrica
PhD Candidate
Faculty of Communication and Culture
University of Calgary