Integrating Ethical Guidelines and Situated Ethics for Researching Social-Media-Based Interactions Lessons from a Virtual Ethnographic Case Study with Chinese Youth

摘要

Ethics is normally understood as codes of conduct and moral compasses. Taking virtual ethnographic research on youth cyber civic participation as a case study, this paper reviews and discusses Internet and educational research ethics at the micro-level, from three perspectives: ethical expectations, ethical decision-making in practice, and ethical dilemmas. Ethical issues discussed include responsibilities toward participants; sensitive information and data protection; potential benefits and harms; access and permission to the observation fields; voluntary informed consent; confidentiality and privacy; online citation and copyrights; data storage and protection; and consequent feedback to participants and universities. Ethical dilemmas are caused by contradictions between ethical guidelines and practical situations. Research ethics is not isolated from, but intertwined with, research questions, methodology and concrete research contexts. Therefore, I argue that researchers should not only respect existing ethical guidelines but also take situated ethics and cultural diversity into account.