Ethics – erring on the side of caution

Posted on by

I’ve had a burning question answered. The answer may change as I continue to ask the question, but for now, I’ve got a semblance of answer.

I’ve been asking several people, trusted colleagues and internet researchers alike, about the need for ethics review for the information I’ve been collecting, and data I’ve been accumulating, for the action research I’m working on for the OEFellows position. It’s been a back-and-forth dialogue, both internally, inside my head, and externally, through voice and text. My recent reading has helped clarify the issue and provided some measure of a definitive answer to my question ‘Do I need to apply for REB review or not?’.

multiple hands covered in mudSeko & Lewis (2017), in Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age (Zimmer & Kinder-Kurlanda, 2017), are proponents of the “cyber-materials as published texts” premise. This comes from Kitchin’s (2007) representation of web-based or online research where “non-intrusive web-based research (1a) “should not be enveloped under the human subject paradigm” (p. 134)”. I take this to mean that the data (tweets, blog posts, etc.) that I’ve collected, with elements of identifiable information such as avatar image, Twitter handle or URL details need not be considered as representative of a person, but rather as a ‘public text’, and thus does not require scrutiny through a research ethics review. Knowing that this area of research and it’s ethical requirements are still clear as mud, at the bottom of the Mississippi I might add, it’s necessary that I err on the side of caution – as suggested by Seko and Lewis (2017).

With this in mind, I’ve begun a process of creating copies of key artifacts and annotating identifiable information from these copies, in order to be able to include images and exemplars into my writing in order to show-don’t-tell the visual images within the chapters of my story towards open. There will be some artifacts where stripping or annotating identifiable information will leave it a meaningless image, so those I will feel confident in using as they are, in order to strengthen the story, while still following ethical standards.

References:

Seko, Y. & Lewis, S. (2017). “We tend to err on the side of caution”: Ethical challenges facing Canadian research ethics boards when overseeing internet research. In M. Zimmer & K. Kinder-Kurlanda (Eds.), Internet research ethics for the social age (pp. 133-150). New York: Peter Lang.

Image Attribution: Photo by Karen Maes on Unsplash