Chapter 2: Ethics Review and YouTube Research with Fertility Preservation Vloggers

This chapter draws on the author’s experience of the ethics application process for a study based in Aotearoa New Zealand documenting the fertility preservation journeys of cisgender, transgender, and non-binary people who seek to freeze their gametes for health, career, and gender transition reasons. The study design entailed face-to-face interviews and focus group discussions. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak in Aotearoa in early 2020, followed by government-mandated lockdown periods, recruitment for the interviews and focus groups was postponed until the research team was able to talk to people in-person. The original focus of the study was adapted to accommodate data collection via YouTube, with its large database and accessibility to publicly available video blogs. While there is no consensus among social researchers and institutional ethics committees regarding research ethics around publicly available data online, our university ethics committee took the view that social media content produced by people who connect and interact with others constitutes ‘human subject research’, and therefore, ethics clearance was required for participant recruitment and selection and data collection. In this chapter, I reflect on the ethics review process relating to the study, the issues raised by the ethics committee at different stages of the project, and the methodological approach the research team took to address the committee’s concerns. I conclude with a discussion of the governance process of ethics review and of the importance of dialogue between researchers, ethics committees, and advisory support teams in understanding the dynamic and changing landscape of online social research.