Introduction to Volume 2: The Ethics of Online Research

The Internet, the World Wide Web and social media – indeed all forms of online communications – have been seen as attractive fields of research since their inception for many reasons. Some of the earliest discussion and commentary were eager in terms of the opportunities for methodological initiatives and innovations in research and the ‘attractiveness’ of easily accessed, massive amounts of primary and secondary data sources.

Using e-mail as a research tool was seen to potentially offer researchers advantages such as easy access to world-wide samples, low administration costs (both financially and temporally), ready-transcribed data and its unobtrusiveness, and ‘friendliness’ to respondents was also valued (Robson & Selwyn, 1998). Once you became an experienced Web ‘surfer,’ you could have access to a wealth of valued and authoritative information sources (Peters, 1998). Instant messaging was seen as a cost- and time-effective method for in-depth interviewing (Fontes & O’Mahoney, 2008); online participants might be better able to ‘tell their story’ in a way that suits them and so may even be ethically sounder than conventional methods of narrative data collection. Traditional survey methods have long suffered from increasing costs and declining responses rates – Web surveys offered an attractive alternative and have the advantage of ease in collecting more sensitive data: people have been shown to respond to Web surveys on sex and health more readily and openly than in face-to-face interviews (Burkill et al., 2016). Glaser, Dixit, and Green (2002, pp. 177–193, 189–190) argue the case for better access to ‘hard to reach’ groups: ‘the anonymity of the internet permits research into marginal groups for whom self-disclosure may have costs, and where participants may be suspicious of researchers and outsiders.’ And Illingworth (2001) suggests that the Internet affords an efficient way of recruiting specialist participants.