What is IRE?
Internet Research Ethics (IRE) is an emerging cross-disciplinary field which studies how research is conducted in online environments and seeks to resolve the subsequent ethical dilemmas in normative and practical terms. While similar to its physical counterpart, conducting scholarly research online is different in terms of ethics and values. For example, online surveys bring new privacy concerns. Research in chat rooms confound our notions of subject anonymity and identifiability. Scraping data from social networks or public blogs complicate issues of informed consent.
Pressing Need
Research conducted on and through the Internet has expanded exponentially in the last ten years; researchers across disciplines make frequent use of such tools as online survey generators, as well as engage in forms of participant observations of virtual worlds. |
|