[Air-L] ethics suggestions?

[Charles M. Ess]

Dear colleagues,

I've been asked to offer some advice to a colleague undertaking research 
on the participation and interaction behaviors of participants in online 
worship services, using online ethnography. (This takes place in a 
German-speaking country, and so GDPR also directly applies.)

The particular environment of research is a service held via Zoom; as 
well, the project will look at (public) Instagram posts and stories.

Ideally, the researchers want to record the Zoom service, which would 
include ca. 24 or more participants simultaneously - which already 
results in fairly small faces on screen.

Most of us can quickly see not only the challenges but also some fairly 
standard approaches to preserving anonymity, confidentiality, etc. - as 
well as standard requirements for data management, both from the 
perspective of Human Subjects Protections as well as the GDPR.

My sense is that good research ethics practices for collecting and 
analyzing the Instagram materials as (more or less) public, are pretty 
well established. Broadly, the data needs to be handled securely by the 
researchers, and no direct copies of, e.g., profile photos or direct 
quotes from texts in final publications unless the person(s) in question 
are prominent public figures. Generally, no such direct quotes, etc. are 
needed - rather, pseudonymised and/or aggregate identities will be 
constructed for use in publication. (But if direct copies / quotes were 
to be used for some reason - especially as all of this takes place 
within religiously-defined spaces / events - informed consent from the 
individual(s) involved, in my view, would be an absolute requirement.)

I am less confident about how to treat the possible recording of the 
Zoom meeting.
1) While asking for informed consent from each participant is feasible - 
there is the usual researchers' (well-grounded) worry that asking for 
consent will result in an occasional no, which will thereby reduce the 
richness of participation, etc.
2) I wonder if something analogous to earlier approaches, e.g., lurking 
in a chat room or listserve, etc. might work here - i.e., requesting 
permission to do the recording from the event organizers, being sure to 
make clear to them all the steps that will be taken to protect 
individual identities and the data collected overall?
Such an approach also strikes me as more ethically defensible than it 
once might have. For example, our colleague Soraj Hongladarom, among 
others, has documented how a collective or relational version of 
informed consent is more appropriate to the Thai society. Others have 
also argued this approach in relation to many other societies and 
cultures that entail more relational understandings of selfhood, etc.
Such an approach seems increasingly feasible to me, FWIW: as has been 
abundantly documented and discussed, especially with the rise of social 
media, notions of selfhood and identity in "the West" have become 
increasingly relational as well, and so a collective form of informed 
consent may be all the more defensible.
None of this would mitigate, of course, the steps needed to be taken 
with the material gathered subsequently, starting with secure data 
management and then avoiding publishing material that could point back 
to an individual (at least not without specific consent).

There is also the fine but important wrinkle here that even with 
pseudonymization and aggregate identities, persons within the 
comparatively small communities involved may still recognize an 
individual source. (My take on this is that careful judgments then need 
to be made regarding possible risks to specific individuals vis-a-vis 
benefits of the research, etc.)

But I'm sure I'm missing at least a few important points and, even 
better, suggestions for how to resolve the ethical issues involved here.

Hence, comments and suggests - best of all, examples and references in 
relevant literatures - would be deeply appreciated.

Many thanks in advance,
- charles

-- 
Professor Emeritus
University of Oslo
<http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html>

3rd edition of Digital Media Ethics now available:
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