[Air-L] Inquiry on screen shots

[Alex Gekker]

Dear Chris,

I never try to be clever, it's no longer fundable :)
Seriously, maybe it came out a bit more flippant than intended - probably
partially due to medium-specificity: I typed the original response on a
smartphone, thus brevity.
I was really just trying to give a contextual example of social media
public-ness and subsequent gradient of use in various forms, using this
thread as a handy example. Your follow up examples corroborate my initial
intent.
That being said, I *would* like to screenshot this thread for our MA
students and discuss this with them. I would invite the thread to think me
with about the ethics of such act, in relation to the original questions. I
could email you all a consent form or do an "opt-out" comment (which might
be truer to the spirit of the mailing-list-as-platform) or I can crop out
the names of the respondents. These are choices that researchers have to
engage with (especially in places, like ours, that lack ethics boards and
clear procedures).

Alex.



On Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 9:05 AM Chris Leslie <chrisleslienyc at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear Alex Gekker,
>
> I think you are making an effort to be clever, humorous, or provocative.
> However, I don’t think the ethical question posed by the original query
> goes away because it relates to something we do every day (or that the
> human subject are doing among themselves). I also think the difference you
> suggest about private messages and public posts is worth thinking about
> more.
>
> For instance, what if I published an academic article about the attitudes
> of Internet researchers and quote your email as an example that reflects x
> number of posts on the AOIR listserv? Depending on my thesis, you could
> rightly be offended and potentially harmed by my article, even if
> forwarding the email chain to your grad students or summarizing the
> discussion for their benefit might have seemed ok. In the journal article,
> I am using your statement as a research finding - a generalization of a
> human trend I have observed that is backed up by quantitative data. Yet in
> sending your email to the group, you didn’t consent to being a human
> subject and you were not given the opportunity to give permission
> afterward. Even if I changed your name and rearranged the words, you could
> still feel like you were identifiable to members of AOIR who witnessed the
> conversation.
>
> I interact publicly with humans in everyday life - asking people their
> opinions about politics or their jobs, for example - in ways that are
> ethical in interpersonal or educational settings. Those activities don’t
> involve the IRB or raise ethical concerns because they are not the
> foundation for research findings. Everything changes when I publish an
> article with my name and academic affiliation and the implied endorsement
> of the academic journal. So, to me, the dilemma you pose doesn’t seem to
> reflect the need for IRB clearance in the first place.
>
> Chris