Note: I'm not sure whether this response falls outwith the scope of the guidelines you are producing, but I decided to post it anyway; if it's helpful then great, if not I apologise!

From my point of view as both an asexual myself and a researcher interested in asexuality, the rules which have been proposed and the comments provided on this list for the most part seem fair and reasonable.

My two cents of ethics boards (sitting on my university's one myself) is that whilst they can be a little out of touch with research conducted on the internet, this is slowly being rectified.  My institution is currently in the process of drawing up some guidelines for the ethical considerations involved in internet research which is a great step forward, but relying on these is not sufficient rigiht now.

However, the guidlines in your initial email do not address the possibility of researchers that wish to use discussion threads which already exist on AVEN as the source material for their research.  The project that I am undertaking for my PhD research (looking into how the internet is changing how people come to terms with (a)sexual difference, with a focus on asexuality in order to both illustrate the primary research aim above and proliferate more scholarly research on asexuality) would greatly benefit from the inclusion of this data and I am sure that I am not the only one.  Considering that this content is already published online and accessible to anyone for whatever purpose they might want to put it, it seems a) futile to veto such research as if someone really wishes to gather data from the message boards there is no way of preventing them doing so and b) that such a ban if in place would disproportionately affect research that would likely be in the communities interests, as researchers that heed such a ban are likely to be more scrupulous than those who could quite easily ignore it and harvest data anyway.

I would recommend developing a set of guidelines for this which should probably be rather strict since the consent gathering practice for this sort of study is rather more complicated than one where the researcher is in direct contact with all contributors. I would tentatively suggest a starting point akin to this:


1) All research to be conducted on AVEN using material from the discussion board must be approved by some important person/people on AVEN prior to being posted. In asking for permission, people should email an address (still to be created). They should send the general description of the study and the consent form (the things that would be shown to people prior to participation.)

2) Projects approved by the process in (1) should be posted in the Announcements forum for scrutiny by the community where members can raise concerns prior to the research being conducted.  Only after a certain consultation period would fieldwork be given final approval.

3) Researchers are asked to have read AVEN's Open letter to scientists

4) Where researchers wish to directly quote a post made on AVEN, they should seek approval from the posting member, as such quotations would potentially be searchable on the internet and complete anonymity cannot be guaranteed.*

* Regarding (4), I don't know what to suggest where the member is no longer active. On the one hand, I would be inclined to suggest that quoting such members should not be allowed, but conversely where such a member's online persona cannot be connected to their offline identity (or other online identities) this would not contravene any standards on anonymity and as such not be unethical in principal.

This is just the first things that come to mind for me and it's rather inexhaustive so I'm sure there's more that could or should be added - does anyone else have any additions or comments to add to that?

It may well be that AVEN already has a set of guidelines for using the site in this way and I just haven't found it yet.  I'm not the most active AVENite (something that I plan to change over the coming months and years!). If it does please point me towards it so that I can take it into consideration and indeed provide comments and suggestions for improvement if they would be welcome.

Kind regards,

Ty Hayes
Doctoral Researcher
Department of Sociology
University of Warwick

########################################################################

To unsubscribe from the ASEXUALITYSTUDIES list, click the following link:
http://jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=ASEXUALITYSTUDIES&A=1