Understanding Research (25 page)

There are some practicalities to bear in mind as we gather and depend upon the web to also store our notes, writing, interview material or other forms of ‘raw data’ and access it to find literature, do fieldwork, or contact interviewees by email.

Whether you opt to archive your work on your own hard drive, in a portable storage device, or by using a cloud computing archiving service, the rule of thumb is threefold: back-up, back-up, and back-up. Two different back-ups should suffice. If you want to include hard copy as well as digital formats of your work then this brings it to three. University and/or workplace servers, and commercial cloud computing archiving services are great when you are on the move or using different hardware access points for your work. However, if the server crashes or goes offline you are in a fix; particularly stressful as deadlines near. Sustainability over a longer period of time is another key consideration. Remember internet products and services are a particularly volatile domain; what is available today may not be next year, or even tomorrow.

[T]he online environment represents new ethical challenges for researchers that require thinking outside of the boundaries of traditional research. Informed consent, confidentiality, anonymity, privacy, the nature of what constitutes private and public spaces, virtual personae, copyright, and more, take on new meanings and require fresh insights when you are conducting research in the online environment.

(Gaiser and Schreiner 2009: 27)

Figure 5.4
Spam

Source
: Chappatte:
http://www.globecartoon.com

To recall (see
Chapter 3
), it is nowadays mandatory for academic researchers – staff and doctoral students, with master and bachelor-level research students increasingly included – to go through a formal ethics approval procedure. Par for the course in the medical and natural sciences where research (experimental or trials) is carried out on human beings or animals, these considerations also apply to any research in which human subjects – and their avatars – are the focus or means for gathering data. Each institution has an overarching code of practice to this effect; and within them each department has its respective procedures and forms to fill in on this count. Ethical considerations cover research that entails gathering material through interviews, focus groups, written texts by ‘living subjects’ for example, diaries, personal correspondence and such like. The formalization of research ethics considerations is also inseparable from any work involving varying degrees of participant-observation, any sort of experimental work, and intentions to carry out covert forms of observation; permissions criteria for the latter are particularly stringent.

To recap, the core principles of all codes of research ethics, whatever variations there may be in national or institutional renditions of basic human rights legislation to protect personal privacy, data, freedom of information, press freedom, and freedom of speech, are:

1. informed consent: permission is granted to access, observe and/or participate, and then use material in the research findings;
   
2. protection of subjects’ identity and right to privacy by insuring anonymity;
   
3. proper and respectful use of any data gathered under conditions of informed consent that is then used only for the purposes of the immediate project;
   
4. obligation on the part of the researcher to ensure transparency and accountability with respect to the research subjects – their words, deeds, and way of life; during and after the research process.
   

Nowadays these criteria encompass research on communities, individuals – as physical and digital entities – avatars, virtual worlds, access to and citation of various sorts of web-content; written and visual texts produced by living research subjects in online settings.
¹²
The fact that visibility is of a different order in web-based research domains, or that there are increasing amounts of research still to be done on what is going on, as well as being produced in open-access parts of the web (for example, readers’ comments pages in online news media, chat-rooms that are not password-protected), does not constitute a
passe-partout
for any online research. Far from it; there are several aspects that need to be considered right from the outset:

Bearing in mind from
Chapter 3
the principles underwriting professional and academic codes of ethics for conducting research with human, and also animal research subjects, we now turn to how these work out in online research settings.

Online research ethics is an area still under construction; sometimes existing codes of ethics have been revised or extended with respect to interviews, surveys, or participant-observation in computer-mediated fields. Sometimes specific codes of ethics have been developed: those developed by the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) for instance (see
Chapter 3
). As is the case with standard research ethics considerations, from formulating a written consent form for your interviewees or simply checking with them if you can use their real names or ‘tags’, for online research this aspect is an integral part of your research design. It too is more than ticking boxes; the decisions you make or avenues you cannot pursue because of ethical considerations all help you in the long run to refine the question and the theoretical assumptions you bring to the original research component.

Just as in ‘real life’, research involving interviews (by email), surveys (for example, using Survey Monkey or other facilities), and particularly participation-observation (for example, of a Facebook group or internet community) requires you to obtain access permission at least once, and under review, and deal with informed consent and anonymity when online. As participants or as researchers, the ethical dimensions to online forms of participation-observation, partial or full immersion, have theoretical, empirical, and epistemological implications.

So what are the main distinctions between these standard considerations and how they pan out on the web or when conducted in computer-mediated ways?

1. For
   participation-observation
   research in many online scenarios the researcher is either wholly or partially invisible to the research subjects. Covert observation, referred to as ‘lurking’ when the observer has not announced their presence formally, is much easier to do. For some students this is inviting as they can conduct observation without ‘biasing’ their findings, or so they think. However, as anthropology, feminist, postcolonial, and action research scholars have pointed out for some time now (long before the internet), all observation is a form of participation, (quasi-)experimental work notwithstanding, but that is another matter.
   

   As avatars, thumbnail identifiers and (decreasingly) signatures can cover for our on-the-ground identifiers this does not mean that web-based identifiers
   (nicknames, avatars singularly or in combination) have no meaning for people. Online anonymity is a relative thing; one’s nickname is also cherished as a ‘real name’. In this respect, the conditions by which your access and presence on an online community is accepted by your interlocutors – research subjects or perhaps even collaborators – can also be dependent on your taking care to anonymize these quasi-anonymous ‘handles’.
   ¹³
   

2. Conducting online surveys, email-based interviews, or analysing web-content
   produced by a community of users, readerships, or members of the public is also easier in one key respect: much of the text is there already. We only need to cut-and-paste; no more transcribing. No more note-taking. This is true in many respects.
   

   However, many a researcher has discovered, sometimes too late, that setting up an email-based survey or online questionnaire does not necessarily lead to an increase in participation. The success rate for email-based questionnaires is quite poor. Moreover, in cases where anonymity is not an integral part of the questionnaire design, permission to name or cite is not a given either. Finally, the sheer volume of text produced by online communities or groups is in itself reason to consider what limits and selection criteria need to apply for you to achieve viable results, or conclusions, in the time you have.
   

3. Access
   permission for any community online is comparable to access permission to any community on the ground. Because access can be granted technically before it is granted officially, for closed communities entry access is not necessarily a long-term prospect for research purposes. Some students, whether or not they are already active members of a community, such as a (P2P) file-sharing site, have found themselves the subject of ‘flaming’ or overt criticism when their status changes from co-participant to researcher. The longer you wait before announcing your presence as a researcher the more chance there is of this sort of negative reaction. When communities are already engaging in semi-legal or socially marginalized interactions (for example, pro-anorexic sites, political organizations, sexual minorities), the need for researchers to obtain permission is also to protect themselves as well as their informants.
   

Philosophical disputes about the epistemological legitimacy of ‘cyberspatial practices’ and those digitally constituted ‘beings’ that produce these practices aside, online research has been raising the ethical and the methodological stakes across the board. This can be daunting for research students. By the same token it is thanks to cutting-edge projects and the trials and errors of fledgling internet researchers that fascinating topics and more rounded codes of ethics are emerging. Two cases drawn from the work of several researchers (students and others) illustrate the above distinctions.

The following scenarios (several projects have been condensed here into two cases) really happened; the researchers involved found themselves obliged to make signifi-cant changes in their research projects as a result. Their respective ethics committees, supervisors, and colleagues all had different takes on the matter.

In the following situations, what would you do?

1. Overt vs. covert observation
   : Is it acceptable for a researcher to observe a password-protected online community without revealing their identity or purpose?
   
   • What if the researcher has gained temporary access already and wants to continue?
     
   • What if the researcher realizes they need official permission well into the research; permission from the administrators let alone from community members is still pending?
     
   • Is the moderator’s approval enough or should all members be asked?
     
   • How often should this access permission, once granted, be renewed?
     
   • Is there a case where
     covert
     research, even in online settings, or particularly for online settings where the research is investigating issues around self-disclosure or illegal practices, is acceptable?
     
2. Researching peer-to-peer practices
   : Should the researcher, having access permission and having provided full disclosure of their role as a researcher with others in a peer-to-peer file-sharing community they have been a member of for some time also engage in downloading content that is protected by intellectual property rights law?i
   
   • Or should they change their research aims and objectives given the
     potential
     danger of becoming liable for prosecution by eventual copyright-holders?
     
   • Are they answerable to the community, their research institution, or the integrity of their original research plan, now compromised by these considerations?
     
   • Is the moderator’s approval enough or should all members be asked? How often should this request for access permission, once granted, be repeated?
     

One thing all these research projects had in common was a shared anxiety by the research student that revealing their role as a researcher (before or even after the fact) would compromise their findings. Put it this way; on-the-ground participation-observation in particular communities also requires permission, reveals us as researchers. There is a distinction between close-up observation within a community and observations made in public spaces such as railways stations and squares. In the latter cases as well, care is needed when approaching individuals to ask them questions. Not everyone appreciates learning that they have been the subjects of systematic observation; would you be in all circumstances?