[Air-L] Online research ethics

[Alecea Standlee]

Wow, 
You have all given me some great feedback and
suggestions. Based on your suggestions, I am going to
file for IRB Approval.   I am going to spend some time
figuring out the specifics of my project and how it
relates to issues of human subject harm. I will keep
you all updated on how my experience goes.

Alecea
--- dddumitr at ucalgary.ca wrote:

> 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
> 
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