Ethical Dilemmas in Qualitative Research with Youth On/Offline

Abstract

Research on the digital and online environment poses several ethical questions that are new or, at least, newly pressing, especially in relation to youth. Established ethical practices require that research have integrity, quality, transparency, and impartiality. They also stipulate that risks to the researcher, institution, data, and participants should be anticipated and addressed. But difficulties arise when applying these to an environment in which the online and offline intersect in shifting ways. This paper discusses some real-life "digital dilemmas" to identify the emerging consensus among researchers. We note the 2012 guidelines by the Association of Internet Researchers, which advocates for ethical pluralism, for minimizing harm, and for the responsibility of the researcher where codes are insufficient. As a point of contrast, we evaluate Markham's (2012) radical argument for data fabrication as an ethical practice. In reflecting on how researchers of the digital media practices of youth resolve their dilemmas in practice, we take up Markham's challenge of identifying evolving practice, including researchers' workarounds, but we eschew her solution of fabrication. Instead, we support the emerging consensus that while rich data are increasingly available for collection, they should not always be fully used or even retained in order to protect human subjects in a digital world in which future possible uses of data exceed the control of the researcher who collected them.

Images of Breastfeeding on Instagram: Self-Representation, Publicness, and Privacy Management

“…To minimize harm to the subjects involved in the analysis (Highfield & Leaver, 2016; Livingstone & Locatelli, 2012), the decision was made to reproduce photographs of only the two users who explicitly allowed the researcher to publish them, and not to insert quotations from captions. In fact, the photographs and accounts analyzed are public, but when they become part of a research article they are archived and reproduced irrespective of the authors’ will (Highfield & Leaver, 2016).…”

Ethical considerations referred to in child health research published in leading nursing journals: 2015–2019

“…Use of the internet is an effective method to recruit participants from diverse backgrounds and improve the efficiency of research (Bonevski et al, 2014). However, it has been argued that engaging children and families online and obtaining informed consent through the internet is complex and could pose additional ethical risks, such as the inability to either conceal or validate responses (Grady et al, 2017; Haigh & Jones, 2005; Hokke et al, 2018; Livingstone & Locatelli, 2012; Mychasiuk & Benzies, 2012). Therefore, ethical guidelines are needed, particularly for research online that engages children and families, to address these issues and inform internet‐based research.…”

What’s in a (pseudo)name? Ethical conundrums for the principles of anonymisation in social media research

“…As Tiidenberg explains, informed consent means that researchers 'commit to giving detailed information on the purpose, duration, methods, risks, and benefits of the study to participants, while participants have an absolute right to withdraw at any time' (2018:470). Most ethics boards require researchers to obtain informed consent when researching human subjects unless they have very good reasons for not doing so (Livingstone and Locatelli, 2014). But informed consent is not always obtained for internet research, partly because the definition of 'human subjects' gets fuzzier when data cannot be easily tied to an identifiable individual (e.g., in 'Big' datasets), and because the growing volume of social media data makes it difficult for researchers to obtain informed consent from all users.…”