[Air-L] IRB and blogs

[Brabham, Daren C]

When you're analyzing texts, you're not analyzing humans, so IRB concerns about the ethics of research on human subjects does not apply. At all. Tell your IRB they betta check themselves.

Now, if you 1) plan on doing interviews with the blog authors, or 2) you're analyzing blogs that only you and a few others have access to (via a password you've been granted by the blog authors), then I think IRB matters in this case. But otherwise, a text is a text is a text. Public blogs are public artifacts for analysis. If I were your master's student, I'd pursue this research without IRB's blessing.

I'm generally irked by the way IRB interferes in the (already ridiculously) slow pace of Internet research, and this case sounds absurd. You're not injecting these blogs with syphilis, after all.

My two cents,

db

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Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
School of Journalism & Mass Communication
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Carroll Hall, CB 3365
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
(919) 962-0676 (office)
(801) 633-4796 (cell)
daren.brabham at unc.edu
www.darenbrabham.com