Discussions from the early ASA blog
Comments on the Open discussion on ethics in anthropology, ASA Conference, Keele
- N Swann & M Balzani said...
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We are ASA members developing a module titled ‘The Anthropology of Cyberspace’ to be taught as part of the Social Anthropology undergraduate programme at Roehampton University, London. As students will be required to undertake a research project, the module will require the students to give due consideration to the ethical issues of social research in an online context.
While the ethical considerations underpinning the Association’s guidelines do transpose from face-to-face to online research, does the ASA intend to issue any guidelines or statements on specific issues such as the extent to which an internet chat room is a public space (often a chat room will have a clear policy on this, but some do not); issues of anonymity and pseudonymity of both researcher and researched community online; and problems of obtaining meaningful informed consent when conducting research online?
Charles Ess and The Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) have produced ‘Ethical decision-making and Internet research: Recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee’ (approved by AoIR, November 27, 2002, www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf). Have other members found these recommendations to be useful? Does the ASA have an official stance towards them?
In the absence of other postings, perhaps this space is an appropriate forum in which to start discussion of the ethical issues found in internet research. - Catarina Frois, Ph.D. candidate (Anthropology) - Institute of Social Sciences (Lisbon-Portugal) said...
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Although I don't work with on-line context, I am very interested in issues concerning anonymity and confidentiality and ethics related, once I am working with 12-step associations where anonymity is one of the rules of this associations. I am also very interest in anonymity on-line and its different uses. I am familiar with a work made by an ethnographer/sociologist who produced very interesting work on IRC (Portuguese context) and that could be useful to you. feel free to contact me (catarina.frois@netcabo.pt) if you wish information on him. And please keep me posted, your work seems to be very interesting.
- Zachari Duncalf - z.duncalf@hull.ac.uk - said...
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Hello, I am a PhD Student in Sociology and Social Anthropolology at Hull. I have been carrying out ethnographic research online using photographs and video diaries. The most comprehensive ethics guides i have found are: Buchanan, E. A. (ed.) (2004) Readings in virtual research ethics: Issues and Controversies. London: Information Science Publishing. I have also found the SRA (www.the-sra.org) ethical guidelines appropriate. Although these guidelines are not specifically related to online spaces they raise questions about how you might tackle each one of these ethics (i think a total of 45) within different spaces, contexts and peoples. I hope this helps.
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