Ethical issues in online qualitative inquiry

Owing to significantly increased human mobility and a revolution in communication, the everyday lives of many individuals often transcend the geographical locations in which classical ethnographic fieldwork took place, challenging present-day ethnographers to include these social spaces in the demarcation of their fieldwork sites. Not only the choice of fieldwork sites but also the issues that are being researched, the methods used, and the way fieldnotes are taken have all been impacted by these changes. One of the most compelling new fieldwork sites ethnographers encounter today is the Internet. Following the connections of the people they study, qualitative researchers are challenged to expand the scope of their fieldwork to include online research sites as well, extending ethnographic traditions of fieldwork into the virtual world. The willingness to incorporate the Internet both as part of “the field” and as a method of data collection is tinged, however, with anxiety about how far existing research methods are appropriate for technologically mediated interactions. When online phenomena are studied, there are adjustments in data collection and analysis that must be made. Online ethnographic research, moreover, has raised a number of ethical questions. The fact that participation on social network sites leaves online traces offers unprecedented opportunities for researchers. Even so, the specificities of this research setting also necessitate a re-examination of the institutionalized understandings of research ethics. Ethnographers must learn how to apply standard principles of human subject protection to a research environment that differs in fundamental ways from the face-to-face research contexts for which they were conceived and designed. The easy access to online data, the ability of a researcher to record these data without the knowledge of participants, the complexities of obtaining informed consent, and the question of guaranteeing the respondents’ anonymity fuel the need for directive guidelines for ethical online ethnographic research. Although in the emerging literature some concrete guidelines can now be found of how to conduct ethical research using social network sites, an internationally accepted framework for online ethnographic research ethics does not as yet exist. Without these guidelines, the onus is on the individual researcher to make ethical decisions in the course of her or his research. In this presentation, I discuss some of the ethical issues I encountered in my own research on the use of social network sites by Brazilian migrants in Belgium in order to provide an understanding of the challenges that are related to online research and, consequently, to the ethical responsibilities of online researchers.status: publishe