WA Language, Gender and Sexuality Research Group
invites everyone to a talk by
mgr Bartłomiej Kruk
Department of Sociolinguistics and Discourse Studies
on
Ethical issues in researching online data
November 19th, 16.45
Room 102A
With the advent of the internet as an increasingly important site for many qualitative researchers, new ethical concerns and dilemmas are starting to emerge. According to Androutsopoulos (2008), a crucial determinant in this respect is the status of the researcher as an invisible observer who is not compelled to disclose their identity, presence and activity, and of whom participants are not aware.
In this talk, I will address the issue of ethics in doing qualitative research online. As a point of departure, I will briefly discuss social-scientific standards with regard to offline research with human participants (such as to data collection and the researcher’s relation with the researched field) generated by variationist sociolinguistics, and problematize their application to the novel computer-mediated context. Drawing on the existing literature of online research ethics and my own ethical predicaments of studying a health-related online support group, I will outline practical guidelines and considerations for ensuring ethical conduct. In particular, I will consider informed consent, as well as privacy and anonymity of research participants as important issues when the border between public and private domains sometimes becomes blurred.
Whilst this talk will predominantly focus on ethics in the context of internet self-help groups, it is my intention that the overall guidelines discussed will be applicable to the work of discourse analysts researching a wide variety of online settings.
Everyone is welcome to attend!
More on the LaGeS Research Group: http://wa.amu.edu.pl/wa/lages
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