Research Ethics

This week’s discussion of ethics will be important to my research proposal because I intend to study humans. It was informative to find out what kinds of research proposals require a RER. I had not previously known that RER’s are usually only needed for studies where human subjects have the role of research participant or subject. Other possible roles for humans include collaborators or members of the research team. Human data may also be used for secondary analysis, which is aggregated and anonymous.

Since my study will involve human participants, it is likely that I will need to undergo a Research Ethics Review. I plan to examine the University of Toronto Office of Research Ethics Guidelines and Practices Manual further while putting together my research methodology for Assignment # 4.

Post-Human Research

The ethics around researching "augmented humans" is something of particular interest to me, and will likely inform future research that I do. Human-centred research can be a minefield, and we should be thankful that we have to abide by particular strictures in constructing our research designs. As Heath and company point out, a substantial critique of obtaining informed consent is that research often changes significantly from beginning to end. Remaining tethered to a set of ethical guidelines can ensure that one doesn't stray too far from the path, no matter what new and revelatory findings might arise. (For an engrossing read, I strongly recommend the two-part piece on corruption in the two-part piece on corruption in the Toronto Police Dept. that has been running in Eye for the past two weeks. It focuses on what might be deemed a "research project" - an initial surveillance setup - that quickly spiralled into a massive, multi-year undercover mafia/drug bust that had to be abandoned when fears of early findings coming to light were brought up to the top brass.)

A different set of ethical concerns arise when studying the physical interconnection between humans and technology, whether one studies prosthesis or technology that breaks the skin. For those of you interested in the subject, I would strongly recommend that you jump over to the iTable section of the iSchool website and find the paper presented earlier this term by Dirk Rodenburg, a PhD student in the program. (The annotated copy, with notes from Brian Cantwell Smith, is particularly valuable.) Dirk writes about the ethics of the "enhanced human" athlete and, although his paper isn't necessarily a site for exploring the act of researching augmented humans, it offers great insight into how such a biological classification determines new ways of communicating with and about subjects. Katherine Hayles, in her book How We Became Posthuman, expands considerably on this subject. Do the same ethical guidelines we use with humans apply to cyborgs? At what point does an "augmented human" become a cyborg? How do we respect the human dignity of an augmented human, especially when there might be greater temptation to treat cyborgs as a means to an end in research?

What's interesting to me, is that a great deal of this knowledge is being hammered out by feminist technoscientists, building on the work of earlier post-structuralists (rather than traditional ethicists). Is the emergence of research on augmented or enhance humans a suitable locale for building in, at the kernel level, things like race/sex/gender issues, access, privacy, and agency? And what of informed consent? If new research in this area is increasingly being done on subjects with severe physical and cognitive disabilities, how does this impact the necessity of capturing informed consent? Consider, for example, the somewhat recent case of Stephen Hawking's wife. He, of course, has been the most prominent "test subject" of research on the augmented body. How does the introduction of a "controlling and manipulative" person in his life impact the decisions that are made around his body as a blank canvas?

Salsa dancing lit. review

After developing a bibliogrphy list of 20 books and articles that are not directly related to my research question, and an one-hour consultation appointment with the head librarian of the reference department at the 4th floor of Robarts library, I have finally accepted the fact that I am really doing a salsa-dancing social science research here. If the experienced reference librarian also hasn't got anything talking directly on my research question, what else can I rely on? Luker for sure, and maybe my skip reading skills that I have developed over the years.

2 months ago when I began to take the Research Method course, I have posted a sticky note on my fridge: "If you sit with your interest long enough, with enough kindness and patience, a research question will in fact emerge. Trust yourself and your work, and all will be well, eventually" (Luker, 2008, p.232). Now I have finally found my research question, and what next? Well, this time I write down this:"Once you have decided that yours is a case of Element A and Element B and Element C, you can answer the question, "What is this a case of?" and you can then go out and read books and articles by smart people that have nothing to do with your case per se, but are very illuminating about Elements A, B, and C in other situations, and better yet, about the interrelationship. Remember, the one thing that all social scientists are doing is looking for pattern recognition" (Luker, 2008, p.134).

After spending the entire Friday afternoon in the Urban Affairs library reading articles, I finally realized what Luker said that "if you specify the theoretically relevant elements and then go educate yourself about what otehr smart people have said about the arrangement of those elements in other contexts, you may well find yourself being surprised. If you can set aside your initial emotion of outrage or concern and specify the elements, bumping them up to a new level of generality, you may well change from whatever was our first, pre-research position"(Luker, 2008, p.138). My research question is why aren't the next generation of Chinese Torontonians using the Chinese Cultural Centre. My original perspective is that these second and greater generations of Chinese Canadians are lack of language skills to appreciate the Chinese historical heritage and civilization, but one academic paper dated back to the 1980s criticized the Canadian high school education system and that many high school teachers were not only lack of knowledge on Chinese culture or hsitorical heritage, but also held discrimination on Asian ethnic groups. My research subjects are Chinese Canadian next generations who are merely college or university students, who probably grow up with the said racist high school teachers. This has given me an insight to review the Canadian high school education system in Ontario as well. Luker's salsa-dancing theory is getting more and more practical now.

Narrative Research Processes

This week’s reading on narrative research is relevant to my research proposal because I want to investigate the subjective experiences of a vulnerable group -- that is, people with social anxiety. It is important that stories about life experiences be viewed as legitimate because they offer a type of natural contextualization that is not always present with other methods.

I am most interested in the problem-solution approach. According to Ollerenshaw & Creswell (2002), the process involves audio-taping interviews, transcribing them, and then reading and re-reading the transcripts to get a sense of the data. I like this kind of approach because it encourages the researcher to discover patterns in the data through repetition. This way, researchers do not begin by looking for specific elements, but allow meaning to naturally emerge.

The next step is to color-code transcripts for the elements of plot structure, to organize the color-coded transcripts into events, and to sequence the events until they make sense. The researcher rearranges the sequence until a resolution to the problem emerges. This approach to problem solving seems useful for complex puzzles and can help researchers discover creative solutions that might not be found using a linear process. I like the idea of rearrangements because it implies that several solutions could be possible, and this method gives the researcher a chance to consider and test each one until the most appropriate is found.

Netnography

Catchy. This is the term Robert Kozinets uses to refer to online ethnography. I admit it's a compelling read (as compelling as an instructional manual on bypassing the methodological challenges presented by virtual ethnography can possibly be). I realized it was not enough to conduct interviews with Internet cafe users or email/hand out surveys; to fully understand the impact of new media in the Arab world, it is essential to follow people's social activities, interactions, and usage of media technologies online. Is it really meaningful to present a study of the democratizing influence of the Internet without studying the content of political blogs, comments, online forums, even social networking sites? In another article, I read the story of a Facebook user named Esraa Abdel Fattah, who started a group in sympathy with a textile workers' strike that led to nation-wide protests against low wages and neoliberal privatization in Egypt. Guess Facebook can be used for non-trivial purposes!

Now the problem is choosing an online group. So many different avenues to choose from: Facebook, Twitter, blogs by prominent Egyptian journalists such as Wael Abbas, even blogs by Muslim Brotherhood members. I was surprised to learn what an active presence they have online.

This'll be fun, can't wait to write 6,500 words on this!

From Luker's "data reduction and analysis" to my research survey questiond design

In addition to our discussion on the difference between Luker and Knight in yesterday's class, I was in fact doubting whether it was relevant to my final research proposal at the very beginning. After all, I will not be actually writing the real paper even when I am articulating that 6,500 words of research proposal. Why bothered to think about it at this point? As I mentioned in the class this week, Luker's readings always provide me inspiration. It doesn't disappoint me this time either. As I read through the entire chapter and reach to the exercise section, I finally realize Luker's codebooks content outline: "code name", "brief description", "when to use", "when not to use", and "example" (pp.215-216). Just like a fresh light crashing on the dark night sky, I suddenly realize that the "data reduction and analysis" can be essential guidelines for my own research survey design. While designing my research survey questions, I definitely need to think about what kind of information that can be rich enough for reducation and valuable enough for analysis. Whatever answers that I am hoping to generate from those questions have to be diverse enough for categorizing and meanwhile directly related to my research question. I am not sure if this is the so-call "reverse thinking", but it seems that I am up to something that I am still lack of a clear picture.

I am also reconsidering the content volume of my survey. My original plan was to design a survey with 20 questions that will contain 15 multiple choices and 5 open-ended questions. However, by the fact that it takes me up to 30minutes to answer 20 multiple choices, I begin to wonder if 5 open-ended questions will be too much or not. The survey questions are designed to be distributed online through Facebook. How long will my participants be willing to hang around on Facebook to answer my survey questions? Can they stay for 30 minutes, or even an hour? According to Luker, these days online survey only has 30-40% responses (pp.147). A friend of mine has over 200 "friends" under her Facebook account and she has distributed a survey containing only 10 multiple choices that takes me no more than 5 minutes to complete on Facebook. The result was that she only got 20 friends who responded to her survey questions. Maybe I should only recruit "volunteers" for my focus group interview but merely rely on financial initiatives to secure survey takers.

Inter-Coder Reliability and Mechanical Turk

After the discussion yesterday regarding inter-coder reliability I had an interesting idea. There is a service that Amazon offers called "Mechanical Turk". This service allows businesses and developers to programmatically create what they call human intelligence tasks (HITs). An HIT usually consists of a simple task, such as identifying the object in an image to more complex tasks, such as language translation.

In the case of inter-coder reliability, a researcher could develop an HIT that requires a user to complete short coding examples, and then compare those results across (potentially) thousands of users. The only downside is that people expect to be paid for completing an HIT - but so do coders. Even more interesting is the fact that one could use Mechanical Turk to do other types of experiments as well. You can also choose your sample relatively granularly. In any case examples like this show some pretty interesting potential.