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Paper presented at the 1st International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, May 5-7, 2005, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Abstract:
Recently, “scholars have recognized that [weblogs] are more than mere tools for communicating online; rather, they provide new possibilities for the Internet as a rhetorical space” (Gurak, Antonijevic, Johnson, Ratliff, & Reyman, 2004). As an emerging area of interest and activity, internet weblogs pose a complicated challenge to those seeking to explore and understand the phenomenon through qualitative research. While much scholarly work has addressed the ethics of conducting internet research (see, for example, King, 1996; Jones, 1999; and Ess & the AoIR Ethics Working Committee, 2002), weblogs represent a relatively new internet application that necessitate a revisiting and rethinking of ethical issues. This paper will review ethical issues significant to internet research, focusing on the particular challenges presented by weblogs as they represent spaces that confuse the boundaries between private and public in a variety of ways. I argue that it is important to determine how notions of public and private are implicated in weblogs and associated activities since the assumed public- or private-ness of these spaces has profound effects on the ethical considerations for researchers. With this in mind, I draw upon theories of the public sphere, and of publics generally, to examine various elements and characteristics of weblogs in order to highlight important ethical considerations resulting from differing understandings of their public and private natures. Indeed, this leads to a questioning of whether ‘public’ and ‘private’ are useful concepts in this context and what that question means for research ethics. From a review of the ethics of internet research and this focused examination on weblogs as a specific research site, I propose a number of guidelines for conducting ethical qualitative research on weblogs and suggest questions particularly important to weblog-focused research, considering their public-/private-ness in relation to ethical concerns.
References
* Ess, C., & the AoIR Ethics Working Committee. (2002). Ethical decision-making and Internet research: Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee. Retrieved January 14, 2005, from http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf
* Gurak, L., Antonijevic, S., Johnson, L., Ratliff, C., & Reyman, J. (2004). Introduction: Weblogs, rhetoric, community, and culture. In L. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the blogosphere: Rhetoric, community, and culture of weblogs. Retrieved January 14, 2005, from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/
* Jones, S.G. (Ed.). (1999). Doing Internet research: critical issues and methods for examining the Net. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
* King, S.A. (1996). Researching Internet Communities: Proposed Ethical Guidelines for the Reporting of Results. The Information Society, 12(2), 119-128.
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