Location
Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii
Event Website
https://hicss.hawaii.edu/
Start Date
3-1-2024 12:00 AM
End Date
6-1-2024 12:00 AM
Description
Ethical decisions play an important role in each step of research design and methodology. In social science research, the boundaries determining ethical decision making can get blurry due to the highly contextualized nature of human-centered research. Netnography, a methodology similar to ethnography but conducted through the internet, is the source of ongoing ethical debate in the academic communities. In this study, we investigate online community members’ beliefs and perceptions around the nontrivial, contestable, and interrelated issues of informed consent and privacy. To advance the conversation around ethics in netnography, we include the voice of members of different online communities by administering a survey to understand their beliefs and opinions around perceived privacy and informed consent in online communities. Our survey results demonstrate the contradictory results that, while online community members do not believe their posts to be completely private, they still believe in the necessity of researchers obtaining informed consent in most contexts.
Recommended Citation
Herfurth, Anne and Bott, Gregory, "Ethics in Netnography: Exploring Privacy in Public Spaces" (2024). Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2024 (HICSS-57). 3.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-57/dsm/netnography/3
Ethics in Netnography: Exploring Privacy in Public Spaces
Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii
Ethical decisions play an important role in each step of research design and methodology. In social science research, the boundaries determining ethical decision making can get blurry due to the highly contextualized nature of human-centered research. Netnography, a methodology similar to ethnography but conducted through the internet, is the source of ongoing ethical debate in the academic communities. In this study, we investigate online community members’ beliefs and perceptions around the nontrivial, contestable, and interrelated issues of informed consent and privacy. To advance the conversation around ethics in netnography, we include the voice of members of different online communities by administering a survey to understand their beliefs and opinions around perceived privacy and informed consent in online communities. Our survey results demonstrate the contradictory results that, while online community members do not believe their posts to be completely private, they still believe in the necessity of researchers obtaining informed consent in most contexts.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-57/dsm/netnography/3