Do Not Harm in Private Chat Apps: Ethical Issues for Research on and with WhatsApp

Abstract

WhatsApp has remained under the radar for it is scarcely accessible to overt scholarly scrutiny. Encrypted chat apps allow for a certain degree of perceived secrecy. Yet the high frequency of civic engagement makes ethnographic research a time-consuming exercise. This article investigates how digital ethnography inside WhatsApp groups requires up-to-date, innovative ethical guidelines. We suggest a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, we should rethink and update 'known' ways of doing ethics, undertaking at least three conceptual operations: going back to the basics, positing as central the notion of 'do not harm', which allows to recentre the user within the research process; avoid reducing research ethics to a one-stop checklist, to privilege instead a recursive, iterative and dialogic process able to engage research subjects; moving past the consent form as the sole and merely regulatory moment of the researcher-research subject relationship. On the other hand, while thinking through innovative ways of considering ethics in chat app research, we ought to take infrastructure seriously, both the site of research and the research ecosystem; embrace transparency and avoid by all means covert bypasses; and guarantee full anonymisation to our research subjects.

Researching Digital Sociality

“…Situating WhatsApp research within digital ethnography is consistent with how some researchers envision social media research in general and WhatsApp research in particular (for example, Barbosa & Milan, 2019;Caliandro, 2014;Murthy, 2008). It is general enough to preserve a nimble ethnographic sensibility that studies swiftly changing (educational) socialities, to ensure that we are driven by what works best for our research, and to sidestep methodological debates and ethnographic siloing.…”

“…A number of scholars have recently been paying more attention to different methodological facets of WhatsApp, yet this effort has been fragmented, incomplete and disconnected from educational research. For example, Garimella and Tyson (2018, p.1) provide a (quantitative) "generalisable data collection methodology and a publicly available dataset for use by other researchers," Resende et al (2019, p.820) propose "a methodology to infer which identified publicly accessible groups are related to politics," and Barbosa and Milan (2019) outline a robust discussion of WhatsApp ethics. Still, a more comprehensive and systematic methodological account on the qualitative use of WhatsApp, particularly in educational research, is missing.…”

“…With the incessant changes, compounding complexity and dynamic unpredictability of social media, researchers are oftentimes confronted with impromptu ethical choices that they need to address immediately. Yet, those challenges cannot be met only with a rigid set of archaic rules that manages the research process (Barbosa & Milan, 2019). Those one-size-fitsall rules are becoming neither feasible nor useful.…”

COMUNIX WhatsAppers: The Community School in Portugal and Spain

“…As part of this research, I became one of the administrators of this private chat and registered all participants, as well as some other members of the coordination team. I started to follow all the 25 group members, respecting ethical commitments on downloaded data Barbosa and Milan, 2019. The group started on the third day of the school and practically ended on the last day with some group members leaving the chat.…”

Wildfire-Like Effect of a WhatsApp Campaign to Mobilize a Group of Predominantly Health Professionals With a University Degree on a Health Issue: Infodemiology Study

“…WhatsApp as a social media platform is a mobile-based instant messenger characterized by the exchange of messages in real-time, usually between two users or among a group of users. With over 1.5 billion users worldwide, WhatsApp has emerged as a leader in the instant messaging industry, outranking other services such as Facebook, WeChat, Viber, and Skype [ 6 , 7 ]. WhatsApp is already widely used for various health purposes, including health education [ 8 ], rapid consultations in surgery, obstetrics, or in case of stroke [ 9 , 10 ], and as a tool for support groups like smoking cessation or weight management [ 11 , 12 ].…”