Lately I have had to reevaluate the ethical and legal aspects of my research methodology somewhat, but I am still not completely clear over what rules and ethical guidelines that apply in Sweden and elsewhere, so I would very much appreciate your comments on this.
For the first part of my study, I have been recording synchronous online meetings of different kinds, and I have always had access to the names of the participants, and have thus been able to ask their permission in advance. In the second part, however, the focus is on the individual in front of his/her computer, communicating both synchronously and asynchronously with different people via different media. I have come to the conclusion that it should be enough for me to ask permission only of the person I would be following, even if my analysis was to include some data which had been produced by someone at the other end of the connection. I based this upon the ethical recommendations that, to the best of my knowledge, are the only “rules” that apply for conducting research with human informants in Sweden and upon the ethical recommendations of the AoIR. Here, among other things, it is stated that you should consider whether the study will focus on ethically sensitive issues. Since my research focuses on conversational structures, I have concluded that I would not need informed consent from everyone involved. I am well aware of the fact that also level of privacy has to be taken into consideration, and it is likely that those who do not know that I am filming the interaction will believe that their conversations are private – since much of the communication will take place for instance via IM and email this will probably be more true here than for instance in communication via IRC. However, going back to the idea that my research shouldn’t be harmful, I still would have thought that my original plan would be ethically defendable.
It has recently been brought to my attention that I might encounter some problems if I keep to this protocol. Apparently, in England there is the English Personal Data Protection Act, which, if I have understood things correctly, states that in order to gather any material at all online you need the consent from everyone involved. One of the questions I need to find an answer to is whether it would be enough to get informed consent after the material has been gathered. Getting informed consent in advance would make it impossible to carry out the study, since you can never know exactly who will contact the informant. Connected to this is the question of whether it is the filming itself which I am not allowed to do, or if it is using the material for research purposes that is the problem.
I will need to research this issue further to find out what rules apply before I decide how to move on with my study. If you can recommend some reading, or if you want to fill me in on what you know about the rules in Sweden or in the English speaking countries, that would be greatly appreciated! If you have information concerning other parts of the world, that would also be interesting, but I focus on English speaking countries since for my study I would like to gather material with near-native speakers of English.
