The ethics of researching unlikeable subjects

Rüdiger, Sofia; Dayter, Daria

doi:10.1515/applirev-2016-1038

Cited by 18 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Another limitation of our review is that our corpus did not include articles on contentious online phenomena like trolling and hate speech (cf. Rüdiger and Dayter, 2017). Also, it included very few cases of the use of images and only one study of the dark web.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethical approval: none sought. How discourse analysts report ethical issues around publicly available online data

Stommel

Rijk

2021

Research Ethics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although ethical guidelines for doing Internet research are available, most prominently those of the Association of Internet Researchers ( www.aoir.org ), ethical decision-making for research on publicly available, naturally-occurring data remains a major challenge. As researchers might also turn to others to inform their decisions, this article reviews recent research papers on publicly available, online data. Research involving forums such as Facebook pages, Twitter, YouTube, news comments, blogs, etc. is examined to see how authors report ethical considerations and how they quote these data. We included 132 articles published in discourse analysis-oriented journals between January 2017 and February 2020. Roughly one third of the articles (85 out of 132) did not discuss ethical issues, mostly claiming the data were publicly available. Quotations nevertheless tended to be anonymized, although retrievability of posts was generally not taken into account. In those articles in which ethical concerns were reported, related decisions appeared to vary substantially. In most cases it was argued that informed consent was not required. Similarly, approval from research ethics committees was mostly regarded unnecessary. Other ethical issues like consideration of users’ expectations and intentions, freedom of choice, possible harm, sensitive topics, and vulnerable groups were rarely discussed in the articles. We argue for increased attention to ethical issues and legal aspects in discourse analytic articles involving online data beyond mentioning general concerns. Instead, we argue for more involvement of users/participants in ethical decision-making, for consideration of retrievability of posts and for a role for journal editors.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethical approval: none sought. How discourse analysts report ethical issues around publicly available online data

Stommel

Rijk

2021

Research Ethics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In terms of ethics, the “gold standards” of anonymity proved to be impossible. As the data are in an online public space and a variety of online search options exist, including Twitter’s own internal search engine, guaranteeing anonymity is impossible, as has been discussed by a range of other social media researchers (e.g., D’Arcy & Young, 2012; Rüdiger & Dayter, 2017, p.257). There is also an inherent tension between anonymity and Twitter’s guidelines, which recommend that tweets should not be altered when reproduced (Page, 2017, p. 318).…”

Section: Methodology Data and Corpus Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender Politics and Discourses of #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption on Twitter

Lutzky

Lawson

2019

Social Media + Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms. Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically, our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions about, “proper” gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites.

show abstract

“…Therefore, given that posters to the forum have already taken steps to anonymise themselves and protect their privacy, it is clear that they expect their posts to be accessible to the public. Nevertheless, following Rüdiger and Dayter's (2017) recommendations for dealing with PUA online forums specifically, a series of steps have been taken to protect the identities of the forum posters and keep intrusion to an absolute minimum. The name of the forum itself will not be given, and the data will be referred to as the 'SFC', no usernames will be provided for posts, and any googlable verbatim quotes or extracts from the forum will not be presented.…”

Section: The Seduction Forum Corpusmentioning

confidence: 99%

The discursive construction of resistance to sex in an online community

Wright

2020

Discourse, Context & Media

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper reports the analysis of a 26-million-word corpus of data from an online Pick-Up Artist (PUA) discussion forum. PUAs often use discussion forums as a place to share 'field reports' of their experiences in seducing and sleeping with women. Such online environments therefore provide a unique communicative space in which the notion of resistance to sex is discursively constructed and represented by forum members. Research in forensic linguistics has traditionally focused on the ways in which discourses of 'resistance' are used by police and lawyers to determine whether consent was given in cases of rape and sexual assault. This paper, therefore, provides an alternative perspective to this issue, and applies a corpus-assisted approach to discourse analysis in order to identify the ways in which 'resistance' is represented by this part of the PUA community. A collocation analysis of the community-specialist term 'LMR' ('Last Minute Resistance') finds three major themes emerging from the data: (i) resistance as something to be overcome, (ii) resistance as insincere, and (iii) resistance as remarkable. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these findings, namely in terms of counter-balancing the utmost resistance standard in the legal system and providing education to prevent the incitement of sexual aggression and cyber-enabled violent offences against women and girls.

show abstract

The ethics of researching unlikeable subjects

Abstract: This article explores ethical conundrums in linguistic research on online platforms populated by 'pick-up artists' (PUAs), a community that learns and practices speed-seduction for short-term mating.

Cited by 18 publications

References 33 publications

Ethical approval: none sought. How discourse analysts report ethical issues around publicly available online data

Ethical approval: none sought. How discourse analysts report ethical issues around publicly available online data

Gender Politics and Discourses of #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption on Twitter

The discursive construction of resistance to sex in an online community

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About