The ethics of digital ethnography in a team project

Abstract

This article draws on researcher vignettes to explore ethical decisions made in the process of collecting and analysing mobile messaging data as part of a team ethnographic project exploring multilingualism in superdiverse UK cities. The research involves observing key participants at work as well as recording them at home and collecting their digital interactions. The nature of ethnographic research raises ethical issues which highlight the impossibility of divorcing ethics from project decision-making. We therefore take on board a reconceptualisation of research ethics not as an external set of guidelines but as being at the core of research, driving decision-making at all steps of the process. The researcher vignettes on which we draw in exploring this process facilitate a reflexive approach and enable us to identify and address ethical issues in our research. In this article, we focus on the potential impact that digital communication technologies can have on the kinds of relationships that are possible between researchers and research participants, and on the roles that both carry out within the project. In doing so, we explore the part that digital communications play in the co-construction of social distance and closeness in research relationships. Our discussions around these issues highlight the need for an awareness not only of how our participants' media ideologies shape their use and perceptions of digital technologies, but also how our own assumptions inform our handling of the digital data.

Face-to-Face Compared With Online Collected Accounts of Health and Illness Experiences: A Scoping Review

“…We term the last type of extant data "co-created, nontopic focused." Included in this category are data derived from Facebook (Reich, 2015) and other social media platforms; mobile messaging systems (Tagg et al, 2017); Wikipedia entries and their revision histories (Pentzold, 2017); Yik Yak-a closed messaging systems for students, no longer in existence (Byrne, 2017); Second Life-a website that allows people to create and have online interactions using created personas; and web sites from "the dark web" (Ferguson et al, 2017), that is, sites on the internet accessible only to persons with specialized software, allowing users and site operators to remain anonymous and untraceable. These studies focused primarily on how people related to one another in online settings.…”

Emoticons in informal text communication: a new window on bilingual alignment

“…Social media platforms like Twitter provide a source of data about language and communication whose quantity far exceeds what is possible in the laboratory and our understanding of the similarities and differences between online and real world communication is fast becoming a legitimate domain of investigation (Metaxas & Mustafaraj, 2012; Bond, Fariss, Jones, Kramer, Marlow, Settle & Fowler, 2012; Tagg, Lyons, Hu & Rock, 2016). For topics such as who influences whom on line, much of the work focuses on nodes and edges in social networks, including communication patterns among users (Morone & Makse, 2015; Kempe, Kleinberg & Tardos, 2015).…”

Disruption in the space–time continuum: why digital ethnography matters

“…Researchers need to consider what they bring to the field, and to analysis, in terms of formal, reflexive practices including their personal and social assumptions but also their digital and media persona, and how these may shape the relationship between researcher and participants (Gershon, 2010 ; Tagg et al, 2017 ; see also Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992 ). Hine ( 2000 ) cautions that even the screen name one chooses is an important consideration because it might affect participant engagement.…”