Discussion #5: Best Practices
Utilizing what we have learned through reading, discussion, and previous activities, you are now ready to design your own best practices guidelines for your research project. Using the Internet Research: Ethical Guidelines from the Association of Internet Researchers as our guide, along with Bailey, Florini and Spiro as inspiration. If you are completing internet research on digital cultures that involve the study of human behavior on platforms, this chart may be a good starting place. If you are conducting humanistic research on data using digital tools (not the study of digital culture), consider reading more in-depth about ethical practices in data curation, geo-mapping, etc. After reviewing, the questions raised in your external tools along with those raised the recorded lecture and readings, attempt to fill in your best practices guide below:
Initial research design, including initial considerations of potential ethical issues, in seeking grant funding.
Initial research processes, including acquiring data: these stages typically entail specific requirements for de-identifying data, securely storing data, and so on.
Analyses, including assessment of how use of particular techniques, formulas, or instruments may re-identify data through aggregation of multiple data sets. This includes considering downstream ethical effects arising from the unpredictability of now-common analytical processes, often algorithmically driven.
Dissemination – i.e., various ways of publicizing research findings and data: this typically includes conference presentations (including injunctions not to tweet or otherwise share sensitive information presented within relatively closed contexts) and publications. An increasingly pressing set of issues are further generated by requirements by national and international funding bodies to make research data openly available.
Close of the project – including the destruction of research data and related materials.
Beyond dealing with the data, your best practices must connect with other humans that are involved in the research process including collaborators and yourself. Moya Bailey signals toward these questions:
- Who are your collaborators?
- What community is your research accountable to beyond your academic community?
- How will you demonstrate your desire to be accountable to them?
- Are there people you can talk to about the impact of your research beyond the IRB?
- How does everyone benefit from the research?
- What questions does the community want answered?
- Can people be compensated in ways that honor their time and skills? How will you take care of yourself in the research process?
- What do you and your collaborators need to stay sustained while conducting the research?
- What happens after the research product is complete?
- How will you be transformed?
- Will the research strengthen your connection to your collaborators?
- Did you and your collaborators come to new understandings?
Post your completed plan to our discussion forum. Make sure to respond to at least two (2) of your peers.
