Research Ethics

Academic researchers whose research involves human subjects are often expected to gain approval for their projects from an institutional ethics review committee before commencing their projects. On this basis, researchers frequently refer to ethical guidelines and codes of practices to understand the ethical requirements for their projects. Such codes and guidelines of ethics are developed and published by concerned social associations. Some UK or European-based examples which are relevant to researchers in the areas of consumer behaviour and marketing include the standards and guidelines published by Market Research Society (MRS) https://www.mrs.org.uk/standards and the International

115 Code on Market and Social Research published by the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR) http://www.esomar.org/knowledge-and-standards/codes-and-guidelines.php. There are also other examples which would be more tailored to online research in line with the netnographic approach adopted in the present study, namely Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR). However, such published guidelines may not always address the particular needs of the researcher especially in light of the complexity of online communications. For example, Orton-Johnson (2010) provides an evaluation of the ESRC framework in online research and suggests that it promotes an over formal vision that fail to address the developing online social world.

Ensuring ethical standards is critical during the process of any research. Netnographic or virtual ethnography is no exception. Indeed, online research methods, including netnography, may sometimes raise more important ethical issues than other conventional offline methods due to the greater potentiality of covert surveillance on participants in the internet (Lindlof and Shatzer, 1998). Consistent with this view, many works have addressed the ethical dilemmas of online research. Waskul (1996) discusses the ethical implications of online research and addresses online interactions as public, but are also private. According to Waskul (1996), researchers need to make a distinction between websites as public domains and the subjective perception of privacy by the users. Waskul (1996) reminds researchers that users of the internet often perceive Cyberspace domains as private places for conversations. Indeed, such distinction between what is viewed as public or private on Cyberspace domains represents the key argument over the ethical considerations of online research.

Shoham (2004) argues that although the public discourse on computer mediated communication (CMC) can be viewed as personal, conversations of members are not

116 private where participants are aware that every user of the internet can read messages posted in the public domain of the internet. Also, users are very likely aware that they can participate in private online forums that are only open to members and their friends who are being granted access. Jones (1994) adds that the anonymity of virtual identities of internet users may not involve the obtaining of consents from participants while there are no risks to users. Jones (1994) also argues that abiding by the conventional ethical requirements may even harm the freedom of participants in the internet as they often choose to hide their real identities. Many others, in line with Jones (1994), have also argued that online dominos are naturally public places which do not involve consenting members (Finn and Lavitt, 1994;

Salem, Bogat, and Reid, 1997; Sharf, 1997).

In addition to the above discussion, Kozinets (2002) also adds that netnography is a naturalistic and unobtrusive research method. While a netnographic researcher can ensure the privacy of participants, there is another concern such as whether participants should be made aware of themselves being researched in an ethical way. On the one hand, the consequences of informing the participants and making them aware of the research project is questioned in terms of the data validity (Webb et al., 2000). On the other hand, there are sensitive topics that require the conduction of a covert research as suggested by Langer and Beckman (2005).

Overall, a netnographic researcher needs to consider the privacy and confidentiality of participants through the collection of public data. Also, the researcher needs to gain consent from participants. As a matter of concern, the selected community for this research (Instructables) is available publicly and requires no membership or registration. This means that its online interactions can be considered public (Waskul, 1996; Shoham, 2004;

Whiteman, 2012). This also means that the use of such public data for the research

117 purposes can be considered ethical. Nonetheless, a one to one announcement was made to the community administrators and members in line with the suggestions by Kozinets (2010) and Healy and Beverland (2013).

Furthermore, consent was also obtained through individual messages from those participants whose posts were quoted or/and their photographs were used in this research.

Other textual postings from those who did not consent individually were only used as contextual in analysing data as Flicker et al. (2004) suggests. Photographs which were perceived as personal such as those which included people were purposefully excluded from the research account. By doing so, the unnecessary disclosure of personal content which is irrelevant for the purposes of the research has been avoided. It is suggested that giving participants the decision to select photographs that represent them can help to avoid some of the ethical issues in photographic representations (Pink, 2007). However, unlike the communities used for conventional ethnography, members of Instructables voluntarily included all digital photographs within the projects that have been included in the dataset thus raising fewer ethical concerns. New pseudonyms were also created in line with King (1996) who suggests that researchers should avoid using the same cyber-space pseudonyms which are used by members of online communities. Overall, this researcher’s ethical position is consistent with the Whiteman’s view (2012) who asserts that researcher’s decision should be informed by the nature of the researched community and the expectations of its participants. Furthermore, an approval has been granted in line with academic requirements.