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MISTICA: Internet research - request for experiences

From: Yacine Khelladi ([email protected])
Date: Sat Mar 02 2002 - 08:07:26 AST

------- Forwarded message follows -------
From: Charles Ess <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: [Air-l] request for descriptions of experiences

Colleagues:

As part of our effort on the ethics working committee to get a sense of
cross-cultural differences concerning guidelines, procedures, and
institutions that affect Internet research, we would be grateful for the
assistance of the aoir folk in the following way.

It is clear that relevant guidelines and decision-making procedures vary
considerably from country to country. The typical United States
university structure includes an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that has
oversight responsibility for university-based research, especially research
that
runs therisk of harming human subjects in some way. If only because the state
of Internet research ethics is not as developed as, say, the ethical
guidelines for anthropology, psychology, medicine, etc. - it appears that
different
university IRBs may be making considerably different sorts of decisions
regarding Internet research. On the other hand, in Europe - perhaps most
notably, in Scandinavia - apparently stricter guidelines for human
subjects research and data privacy exist than can be found in the U.S. At the
same time, however - at least in Sweden, according to one of our committee
members -there is nothing equivalent to the U.S. university IRB board. Rather,
there are national committees with responsibility for ethical oversight - but
these committees do not seem to take an active oversight role: rather, they
are consulted when a researcher is in doubt. The upshot seems to be:
Internet researchers in the U.S. are more directly confronted with the need to
justify their research as ethically sound before an IRB board (or its
equivalent) than colleagues elsewhere. And while the relevant law and
ethical codes may
be stricter elsewhere - the very lack of such codes in the U.S. may,
paradoxically, issue in relatively stricter limitations on U.S. researchers?

This is clearly a crude and limited picture: here's where we would like
to enlist your help.

We would appreciate not only any general tips and discussion that
researchers may be able to provide the committee - e.g., pointers to
ethical guidelines and law that we may have missed (please review our website
resources - <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/aoir/ethics> and our preliminary report -
<aoir.org/reports/ethics.html> to see what we have collected over the
psat year), especially outside the U.S. context; descriptions of whatever
ethical regulation may exist and how the process works, etc. We would also like
to request accounts of specific experiences (in effect, specific case
studies) - e.g., examples of where Internet research was either approved or
disapproved on ethical or legal grounds, with some description of how these
decisions
weremade, by what persons, institutions, committees, etc.

We're hoping that this sort of information from aoir will give us a
better picture of "what's going on" not just in the U.S. but around the world
regarding oversight of Internet research - specifically as involving the
application of particular ethical guidelines and legal requirements -
as currently experienced by researchers.

People are welcome to share their experiences with the general aoir list
if they feel comfortable doing so. Any material sent to me - for
distribution to the committee - will be treated in strictest
confidence. That means: we
will not refer to the material beyond the bounds of the committee without (a)
acquiring permission from the author(s) to do so, (b) protecting the
privacy and confidentiality of the authors as desired - e.g., by keeping
material anonymous, using pseudonyms and other means of disguising sensitive
information, etc. Of course, if individuals _want_ to be treated as
authors making a contribution, perhaps to be published as part of our reports,
web documents, etc., with appropriate attribution - we will happily do so
as well.
But please make your preference - i.e., for confidentiality or publicity-
clear.

On behalf of the ethics working committee - thanks in advance for any
assistance you may be able to provide.

Charles Ess
Director, Interdisciplinary Studies Center
Drury University
Springfield, MO 65802 USA
Home page: http://www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html
Co-chair, CATaC 2002: http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/~sudweeks/catac02/
"...to be non-violent, we must not wish for anything on this earth which
the meanest and lowest of human beings cannot have." -- Gandhi

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