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Scenario 1. Project title: Rural experiences of 'gay' sexual identity. Research questions: What is the role of the internet in providing an outlet through which rural gay males can freely express their sexual identity?
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Scenario 1 • Project title: Rural experiences of 'gay' sexual identity. • Research questions: What is the role of the internet in providing an outlet through which rural gay males can freely express their sexual identity? • Research methods: Covert observation of specific gay chat rooms of which you are a member, followed by synchronous interviews of self-selected sample gained through a message transmitted to mailists. • Ethical issues?
Scenario 2 • Project title: Participatory research and internet activism:how activists involved in environmental and social change politics utilise the internet – their internet activism. • Research questions: Exploring the opportunities and tensions the internet offers to activists. What is the role that the internet plays in the broader dynamics of activism and activists everyday lives? • Research methods: Onsite face-to-face interviews, followed by online email interviews with participants recruited during onsite research. • Ethical issues?
Scenario 3 • Project title: Social exclusion and the internet in Tanzania • Research questions: Who is using the internet in rural Tanzania, and what for? • Research methods: Online questionnaire of participants using a mutli-purpose telecenter, observation of the multi-purpose telecenter, followed by face-to-face questionnaire of non-users. • Ethics?
Informed consent • How will you gain informed consent? • How can the participant withdrawal from the research? Is it easier or harder to withdraw compared to face-to-face research? • Is deception a defensible research strategy? Can 'lurking' as socialisation into the online culture of a group be an important prerequisite for research?
Confidentiality • How can confidentiality be assured and how might this vary with the nature of the research venue? (e.g. Chat rooms compared to weblogs, webpages, emails to large listservs). • How might subject anonymity be achieved in practice? • How can you improve data security? Can you promise that your electronic information will not be accessed and used by others?
Privacy • Can you agree in your groups whether the data you collect will be public or private? • How might participant expectations of privacy vary with specific research method used? • Is alienation a more useful concept to use when considering ORE?
International inequalities • How might the digital divide limit who can we 'speak' to and whose lives we can engage with? Is this an important ethical issue? • Can you assume everyone has the ability to speak freely on the internet? Any censorship issues? • What languages are we going to use to communicate our research? How might this limit who can we speak to? • What online power inequalities might be significant (race, gender, sexuality, age, economic position)?