Some Ethical Considerations and Resources for Analyzing Online Discussions. ERIC Digest.

This Digest introduces ethical considerations related to acquiring and analyzing online data and provides resources to support sound practice. Because online conversation is relatively new and unfamiliar, and takes place at a distance, participants may not realize or may not remember that their conversations could be made public. A researcher affiliated with a university or similar institution will have an institutional review board to help with ethical issues. Those who are not associated with an organization with the equivalent of an institutional review board should follow ethical principles as laid out in several resources that are readily available. The least problematic conversations are those that take place entirely in the public domain in situations in which people know that they are publishing to a public area with unrestricted viewing. If a domain has established any degree of privacy, communications should be considered privileged. If a researcher sets up a site to collect data, he or she is ethically bound to let potential participants know that their contributions will be data in a research project. Researchers engaged in online conversations should begin with established techniques and then adapt these to the online environment. (SLD)