Internet Research and Ethic

Personally, I am thinking the readings for this week could fall into two big categories, one part of the readings touch the issue of using a blog to conduct reflexive research and the other deals with the issue protect subjects under the backdrop of doing research with Internet tools.

Watt:

It tends to be beneficial to have research journals to keep records of every stage of doing research. Having ideas came to you written down is good and will stimulate more points. Writing down one researcher’s beliefs, thoughts, and feelings in a timely way could keep them tracking their bias and clear how do that affect their research. For me personally, this is also a “think aloud” process, which refines your thoughts.

In the following part of the article, the author listed the importance of having reflective blogs for every stage of doing research. One point that Watt made in the section that really resonates me is that there are challenges especially for qualitative researchers need to face. However, to me, they are the challenges that all researchers should face. Having blogs tracking people’s thoughts leaves openness for researchers to hone and refine their thoughts. I saw this openness from the journal the author made about her confidence about capabilities of participants and that her personal opinions’ inevitably imposed on participants. This also happened on my research. I knew which classroom might have better learning than other classrooms from my observing and data collection. If I were asked to do a case study, I would attempt to find potential cases from the classroom that I thought would be the stars.

One other risk Watt brought up in the article is to have rapport relationship with subjects. This may be risky as researchers might expect more from the subjects. This connects back to my own experiences that I would expect more from the class that I thought learn well.

Hardey:

Technological tools are important for researchers to collaborate with each other. However, the dilemma is it would publicize private information, especially for qualitative researchers. Hardey brought the notion of collaborative and collective to the fore. Being collaborative means the formation of personal social networks which means a place where research work could be shared exclusively to researchers. Whereas, collective is used to describe the broader social network in which all of the information could be shared. This is aligned with their caution of collecting data from blogs. They pointed one thing that is quite relevant to Watt’s article was that developing rapport relationships with your subjects. This could be risky at some time because this might violate the validity and objectivity of research. Becoming friends with research subjects may influence the objectiveness researchers should have.

The benefits of collecting data by using web 2.0 technologies could be understood from the perspective of situating participants in a natural environment. The data collected is seen as “real”. However, data collected from blogs tend to have problems of identity disclosure. Although researchers try hard to protect subjects’ identities, such as with pseudo names, subjects’ friends’ information could also be disclosed during the research process. Another risk raised by Hardey was the dichotomy of people’s identities of online and offline was not very clear. This could make data collection a bit difficult than traditional ways as researchers need to distinguish the authenticity of online subjects.

The major argument that Hardey made was new technologies brought the benefits of ease of sharing to researchers. However, it also brought some risks of conducting research. Although the overarching goal should not be changed: protecting research subjects, there should some attunements and nuanced way of protecting subjects under new situations. This is also reflected in Enyon’s article.

Enyon et al.

In this paper, the authors also pointed out the question of protecting the privacy of subjects.  However, their assumptions were a bit different than Hardey’s points that although internet research would bring us benefits, there are some risks that researchers didn’t encounter with traditional media. Enyon et al pointed that in general, researchers need to find a balance between the benefits and harm to subjects both online and offline. Personally, I lean more towards to Hardey’s points that new risks would be brought up by internet research tools. Therefore, I am a bit suspicious of Enyon’s points that online research is not intrinsic more likely to be harmful than face-to face research. With constantly making connections with Hardey’s article, which discussed the necessity of checking online identities, I saw Enyon also pointed out the importance of contacting the subjects offline although the research was conducted online.

One part of Enyon’s chapter struck me is the ethics of conducting researches on people who need to do “bad” things onto others who don’t exist and are simulated in the virtual world. However, it’s hard to predict how do these experiments impact subjects. One example occurred to me. We implemented our curriculum design to middle schools in New Jersey.  Our simulation was designed to simulate the pond system in which fish would die. We want to teach students mechanism of why fish die by asking them to explore the simulation. Most of the students felt bad because they killed the fish.