Interesting.
(excerpts from the paper linked above)
'Special thanks must go to the Mumsnet users who allowed me to reproduce their posts, originally written with quite a different audience in mind, in my study. Thanks especially to xxxxxx and xxxxxx, whose generous engagement with my research cannot be underestimated in the development of my approach to internet research ethics.'
'
'Some key insights garnered through observation, and developed through subsequent reflection and analysis, include my growing understanding and appreciation of the norms of participation, interaction and sharing within the Talk forum. Observing the site through the eyes of a participant,bfor example, I have been able to recognise that my research has the potential to cause harm through violation of users’ expectations. Such insights have had a significant effect on the ethical decision-making process for this study'
'I use QSR International’s qualitative data analysis software, NVivo 10 (2012), to preserve sampled threads in a static format, which can be accessed for later reference and analysis. Using NVivo’s ‘NCapture’ function, I save threads in their original format and transfer them into an NVivo project space. By using this function, rather than copying and pasting text into a word file or using screenshots, for example, I am able to retain threads from the Mumsnet discussion forum in full, including all the idiosyncrasies of their original context. I integrate new threads into my project space over time, so that it gradually comes to resemble the kind of ‘log’ of interaction that Herring(2004) places at the centre of her ‘Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis’. I describe this collection as a ‘corpus’, which I define as a structured set of naturally occurring texts, albeit quite a small one in this instance. Once threads have been captured and saved in this way, I am able to access, annotate and code them within my NVivo project space'
't became clear to me that a lot of Mumsnet users value their sense of privacy and anonymity very highly, with many exercising their autonomy and agency in imaginative ways to control and shape the accessibility of their posts and the degree to which they are identifiable as single users. As an observer-participant, I was able to recognise the potential for my research to cause harm through violation of such norms and to re-evaluate my ethical choices accordingly. One of the most significant changes I made as a result of these considerations was to contact all of the Mumsnet users whose words I wished to quote, and/or analyse in detail, and ask for their informed consent. By seeking consent, I gave potential participants the power to decide for themselves whether or not they were happy for their posts to be used for research purposes. Subsequent amendments to my research ethics approval form reflect this shift in my approach and the steps I took to protect my research participants. For example, I state in my second version of this form (see Appendix I) that ‘Although the Mumsnet Talk forum is explicitly public, I believe that there is uncertainty regarding what users perceive to be ‘public’, and how they anticipate their interactions will be used. I therefore… seek informed consent from participants whose contributions will be analysed in detail, and potentially quoted in publications or presentations’. These amendments were also approved by the ethics committee at Aston University'
'I make it very clear in this message that silence will not be interpreted as consent; in other words, contributors who did not respond were not included in
the study. Samples of consent from participants included in this study can be found in Appendix K. My message also gives contributors the option to have their usernames anonymised. Several participants have chosen this option, despite already using pseudonyms, and have subsequently been given new names that retain the spirit of their original username. The fact that many
participants made this choice shows that ‘anonymity’ is a complex matter of protecting individuals’sense of privacy and dignity, and respecting the steps they have taken to control which selves they present to the world. However, guaranteeing anonymity is unfortunately not a straightforward process when data are collected online because quotes can often be traced back to the original source through a web search'