Building Up A Research Ethics System 23713.4 Tackling Emerging Challenges
Advances in research and research methods have led to the
emergence of ethical issues which were not handled in the past.
Conventional approaches to ethical issues – such as anonymity and
consent, and avoiding any level of risk – have been criticized as being
difficult to apply in research using ethnographic methods (Small, Maher
and Kerr, 2014), online methods (Roberts and Allen, 2015), visual and
creative methods (Riele and Baker, 2016) and covert methods (Roberts,
2015 ).
For example, the use of content on the Internet for research has led to
the difficulty of distinguishing public and private data, e.g. personal and
even intimate information shared openly on social networking sites.
User-generated content, such as blogs, are often considered publicly
published. Yet, users may regard their blogs as a part of their
identification rather than simply publicly accessible data (Markham and
Buchanan, 2012). The use of online surveys for data collection has also
presented the problem of recognizing participants’ identity and
obtaining their consent. The use of visual data (e.g. photographs and
films) usually enables individuals to be identified; and, despite the
availability of technology to obscure facial features (Wiles et al., 2008),
it may not be possible to obtain consent from all people shown in visual
materials. Further consideration is needed when applying the new
research methods in compliance with the ethical principles. For instance,
Cu, Suarez and Maria (2016) discussed the adaptation of the ethical
principles – respect for persons, beneficence and justice – indicated in
the Belmont report in the creation of emotion corpora, focusing on the
concerns for human subjects from developing countries.
The trend towards open data and open science, for transparency and
replication, as well as secondary analysis by other researchers or for
knowledge transfer to policy-makers and practitioners, may conflict with