[Air-L] Inquiry on screen shots

[Chris Leslie]

This is an interesting discussion. I think Virginia Balfour is right (quoted below). There’s no substitute for permission, which may be troublesome due to the nature of the inquiry - are people who comment on revenge porn likely to consent to having their comments be used as part of research?

To me, being published in a research article is different than saying something publicly. If a research article is making a generalization about a practice based on someone’s published comments, doesn’t that add a layer of scrutiny and attention that did not occur in the original context? It seems to me that this ethical concern is greater than the claim that the posts were made publicly.

Although some previously published research probably violates this standard, maybe it’s worth discussing in the methodology section. Even if the posts are all anonymized and paraphrased, the results could be sound research. Looking at (n) posts, 42% used phrases like a, b, and c … the only difference is without the screen shots, a reader of the article would have to go to the website to survey the posts independently.

On Feb 28, 2019, at 3:49 AM, Virginia Balfour <virginiabalfour at hotmail.com<mailto:virginiabalfour at hotmail.com>> wrote:

One possible way to have got around this would have been to have sought a variation of the ethics approval to approach the participants and ask for their approval to use the comments. This wasn't something I pursued due to time constraints, but it may be something you could do if you have the time.