1. Online research ethics: some thoughts

• Ethics on the agenda but notably silence about online research ethics

• Surprising owing to the increased formal regulation and research governance over research ethics

• Before proceeding some caveats- work-in-progress, growing consensus, flexibility

• Is there anything special about the online environment that requires new set of ethical guidelines?

• Computer ‘betwixt and between’ categories of alive/not alive, public/private, published/non-published, writing/speech, interpersonal/mass communication and identified/anonymous

• Hine (2005: 5): ‘Online research is marked as a special category in which the institutionalised understandings of the ethics of research must be re-examined.’

• (AoIR) Ethics Working Committee OR can entail greater risk to individual privacy and confidentiality, greater challenges to researcher in gaining informed consent and greater difficulty in ascertaining participants’ identities

• Guidelines for ORE initially showed little common agreement but recently growing consensus and greater recognition of the similarities between online and onsite research ethics

• AoIR ethical guidelines document stresses ethical pluralism, cross-cultural awareness, and guidelines not recipes. See http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf

• Ethical guidelines are goals on which the research should focus rather than a prescriptive set of rules which will need to be creatively flexible given the changing nature of cyberspace

• Ess and the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (2002: 4) there is more than one ethically defensible response to an ethical dilemma: ambiguity, uncertainty and disagreement are inevitable

• Convergence in general approaches to ORE simultaneously augmented by an ‘ethical pluralism’ in which there is a continuum of legitimate ethical choices available to the online researcher

2. Instructions group activity

• Get into groups of 4 people• Choose one scenario. • Choose one (or more) of the following ethical issues to

consider: Informed consent, Confidentiality, Privacy, International inequalities

• Discuss in group for 10 mins • Follow discussion by each group raising ONE key

ethical issue that has arisen in your research (using ORM if possible).

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3. Class Discussion• What key ethical issues are raised in your

scenario?• What key ethical issues have arisen in your

research (using ORM if possible)? • How and why might these be different (or

similar) to ethical issues in onsite research?• For a much more detailed discussion see

Ethics module www.geog.le.ac.uk/orm/