[Air-L] Ethics and retrospective consent

[Philippa Smith]

I'm in an unusual situation in that I want to analyse language from a discussion that occurred in a listserv in March this year but which is not publicly archived.  As a subscriber to the listserv I saved the discussion myself because the topic was of interest to my PhD research.  I have all the email addresses of the 16 people who posted on this discussion and I am making an ethics application to contact these posters for consent to linguistically analyse what they said.  However I have been told by an ex-ethics committee member that I would be unlikely to get ethics approval for this because it is a retrospective discussion which is private and they would have been unaware that their comments might be part of research, and because it is not publicly archived (even though anyone can join the listserv).  I thought if I at least got the posters' permission then this would be okay. I'd be interested in other peoples views.  Please note I have not yet put forward the ethics application (due tuesday).

I guess I can draw a comparison to this listserv-  How would people feel if they were approached about their comments posted several months ago being used for research.  Surely if they gave consent then that would be okay?  I also might add that I consider the research a linguistic analysis rather than looking at the individuals as human participants - but thenI guess that is another can of worms!

Many thanks in advance for your comments.

Philippa Smith
PhD Candidate
Institute of Culture, Discourse & Communication
Auckland University of Technology
Auckland
NEW ZEALAND