7.2 New Ways of Doing Research and Their Ethical Issues
Online research can save time and resources and provide access to specialized groups of respondents. That’s why many researchers use the internet as a source of data or as a research terrain. This new way of doing research, however, requires reconsideration of the research ethics for online world. Read the following case and post your comments on what you think the procedure should be.
Case Study: Thesis Research on Internet
Tina is a master student of science education. Her master's thesis shall study problems that novice teachers face in their science lessons. The thesis will be based on qualitative approach. Tina planned to interview her fellow student teachers and young graduates about their teaching experiences. Unfortunately, her thesis is behind schedule and she have not yet started collecting data.
Tina is also a member of an on-line discussion group with more than hundred members, mainly pre-service teachers (future teachers studying in different colleges or universities) and some early carrier teachers (young in-service teachers). Members of the group share information about their lessons in primary or secondary schools and about problems they encountered. Tina originally joined the group to discuss her own experiences and hopefully to get some support. Now, she realized she could use the posts from the discussion group as data for her master thesis. She plans to download all posts from the group web page, anonymize them (erasing the authors’ names and other information that might identify them) and use them in her qualitative study. The posts will be analyzed and sorted into different categories of problems. For each category, sample verbatim quotations from data will be included in the thesis.
Tina is not sure whether the informed consent would be needed for her study (and what to do if some group members would not provide the consent). The group has many active members and Tina is under some time pressure. Maybe the consent is not necessary? After all, this is just an observational research (no treatment of participants is involved), and Tina will work with data that group members have already posted on internet.
Source: Author
Assignment 1
What would be your recommendation to Tina regarding the ethical aspects of her study? Post your response to discussion forum. Provide arguments for your advice.
Assignment 2
Choose one classmate's contribution and post a response to it, evaluating the classmate's advice and the arguments behind it.