[Air-L] IRB and blogs

[Wendy M. Christensen]

Kevin's point is an excellent one, and clarifies my earlier post that sometimes even with "published" material on public blogs and message forums, the writers often have some expectation of privacy with the personal material they post. This does not mean we ought to go through IRB to analyze these kinds of documents, but that as researchers we need to decide for ourselves how much about the material we study is appropriate to identify in our writing (and what we might feel more comfortable using a pseudonym for). 

For example, in my research on the mothers of service members who belong to public online support forums, I received IRB permission to conduct interviews with the mothers, but not for my analysis of their online material. Still, I decided to use pseudonyms for participants even when they had their own publicly published blogs in order to protect their personal views. Individuals use the internet differently, and when people blog about personal issues they often do so to share their thoughts with what they perceive to be a small group of others in the same situation. Sure, I could have considered their blog posts to be public documents and cited them by name etc., but I would not have felt good about that decision. It is not just text, there are individuals behind that text. Yes, the internet is public, but the way people use it blurs the lines between what is public and what is private, and we have to consider the implications of this complexity on a case by case basis.       

-Wendy


Wendy M. Christensen, Ph.D.

Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bowdoin College
wchriste at bowdoin.edu

On Oct 17, 2010, at 12:06 PM, Kevin Guidry <krguidry at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 9:31 PM, Brabham, Daren C
> <dbrabham at email.unc.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> The act of publication is to make public a set of ideas, and at that point it becomes an
>> artifact--a text--game for analysis without the concern of human subject research ethics
>> (in my opinion). Again, if the authors attempt to password-protect their work, that's an
>> IRB-worthy issue, but otherwise, even if it's about a "personal matter," the act of
>> publication is a public thing...thus no IRB needed.
> 
> I apologize if I can not articulate this very well but the statements
> above bother me quite a bit.  I think one of the things that bothers
> me most is the assumption that all publication is equal and that
> privacy is binary when those are both very problematic (and
> demonstrably false) assumptions, particularly the privacy one.
> Jeremy's reminder about those with limited mental capacity or agency
> gets at one potential source of this unease by reminding us of the
> need to contextualize this discussion but there is a whole lot more
> context that is necessary.
> 
> It would also be good if we could be more careful to disambiguate
> discussions and decisions about the politics and procedures of IRB
> approval from broader and more nuanced ethical issues and concerns.
> I'm all for telling IRB that some studies or decisions are not theirs
> to make or control but let's please be careful not to imply that we
> can toss out ethical concerns because we're "working with text" or
> "not working with people."  I don't think anyone here intends that or
> has said that but it's an easy conclusion to reach and something to be
> avoided with great caution, IMHO.
> 
> 
> Kevin
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