Natasha Whiteman

Accounting for ethics: towards a de-humanised comparative approach:

In rejecting the ultimate authority of proceduralised ethics and instead emphasising the ongoing complexity of ethical manoeuvring, writing on ethics-as-process often presents the individual researcher as the authentic locus of ethical practice. This article seeks to distance from such humanist tendencies. It aims to shift attention away from the experience of the ethical researcher to consider, rather, the fixing of ethical stances in accounts of activity. Arguing for a comparative approach to the empirical, accounts of two different activities are examined: online research and online media consumption. A framework for describing the anchoring of ethical positions across these texts is introduced, one that challenges the achievement of ethical ‘security’ in research. It is argued that claims that the researcher is an authentic point of access to an ethical truth must give way to a consideration of the modes by which ethical claims are made.

Whose Responsibility is Adolescent’s Mental Health in the UK? Perspectives of Key Stakeholders

The mental health of adolescents is a salient contemporary issue attracting the attention of policy makers in the UK and other countries. It is important that the roles and responsibilities of agencies are clearly established, particularly those positioned at the forefront of implementing change. Arguably, this will be more effective if those agencies are actively engaged in the development of relevant policy. An exploratory study was conducted with 10 focus groups including 54 adolescents, 8 mental health practitioners and 16 educational professionals. Thematic analysis revealed four themes: (1) mental health promotion and prevention is not perceived to be a primary role of a teacher; (2) teachers have limited skills to manage complex mental health difficulties; (3) adolescents rely on teachers for mental health support and education about mental health; and (4) the responsibility of parents for their children’s mental health. The research endorses the perspective that teachers can support and begin to tackle mental well-being in adolescents. However, it also recognises that mental health difficulties can be complex, requiring adequate funding and support beyond school. Without this support in place, teachers are vulnerable and can feel unsupported, lacking in skills and resources which in turn may present a threat to their own mental well-being.

Ethical Stances in (Internet) Research

This chapter explores the ethical destabilisation that the development of the Internet and related new media technologies has provoked, an unsettling of ethical expectations and assumptions that is felt by both researchers and Internet users. Examining researchers’ responses to the challenges of conducting research in online environments, the chapter considers how the idea of an ‘ethical’ Internet researcher has emerged in this work. It then explores moves towards localised and contingent research ethics in recent writing about online and offline research, and considers how these moves relate to the institutionalisation of ethical guidance and regulation of research in academic contexts. The chapter closes with an introduction to the author’s study of two online fan communities – a study that underpins the discussion of ethics in the chapters that follow – and a description of the key ethical issues that were faced during the project.

Potential of social media in promoting mental health in adolescents

The growing prevalence of adolescent mental disorders poses significant challenges for education and healthcare systems globally. Providers are therefore keen to identify effective ways of promoting positive mental health. This aim of this qualitative study was to explore perceptions that social media might be leveraged for the purposes of mental health promotion amongst adolescents aged between 11 and 18 years. Utilizing focus groups conducted with adolescents (N = 54), educational professionals (N = 16) and mental health practitioners (N = 8). We explored their views about the value of social media for this purpose. Three themes were identified. First, social media appears to have potential to promote positive mental health. Second, adolescents frequently utilize social media and the internet to seek information about mental health. Finally, there are benefits and challenges to using social media in this way. We conclude that despite challenges of using social media and the risks, social media does offer a useful way of educating and reaching adolescents to promote mental wellbeing.

Is social media bad for mental health and wellbeing? Exploring the perspectives of adolescents:

Despite growing evidence of the effects of social media on the mental health of adolescents, there is still a dearth of empirical research into how adolescents themselves perceive social media, especially as knowledge resource, or how they draw upon the wider social and media discourses to express a viewpoint. Accordingly, this article contributes to this scarce literature. Six focus groups took place over 3 months with 54 adolescents aged 11–18 years, recruited from schools in Leicester and London (UK). Thematic analysis suggested that adolescents perceived social media as a threat to mental wellbeing and three themes were identified: (1) it was believed to cause mood and anxiety disorders for some adolescents, (2) it was viewed as a platform for cyberbullying and (3) the use of social media itself was often framed as a kind of ‘addiction’. Future research should focus on targeting and utilising social media for promoting mental wellbeing among adolescents and educating youth to manage the possible deleterious effects.

Text or Subjects

What constitutes ‘human data’? How do we recognise the ‘living persons’ in mediated environments? What are the implications of the separation of author and utterance in online settings for research ethics? Making reference to the diverse nature of identity formation in online environments, the chapter explores the significance of the ‘human subject’ for research and how the ‘subjects’ of online and offline research are brought into being in research methods texts. The chapter examines both text and human subject approaches to Internet research and explores the ways that maintaining these approaches can be unsettled by the actual experience of research. The chapter also considers the challenge of verifying online data and the difficulties that can arise when researchers encounter distressing material during the conduct of research.

The Achievement of Research Ethics

This chapter presents a conceptual framework for understanding the ‘doing’ of ethics in research. The chapter marks out four domains of ethics (the ethics of the academy, institution, researcher, and researched) that provide resources for, and can be seen to shape, the localised production of ethics in any research project. The chapter suggests the differing responsibilities that these domains may place upon the researcher and starts to question the relationship between them. To what extent, for example, should the researcher’s actions be informed by those of the researched? This framework for thinking about the achievement of ethics in research is introduced through a critical engagement with two texts: an early paper on Internet research ethics by Susan Herring and an educational research methods text by Paul Dowling and Andrew Brown.

Unstable Relations: Observational Methods and Ethical Instability

This chapter moves from a focus on the production of ethics in research towards an interest in the undoing of ethical positions, the challenging of ethical stances that can arise from the unpredictable and contingent nature of research. Drawing from the accounts of scholars who have engaged in observation-based studies of online and offline environments, the chapter explores the nature of ‘participation’ in fieldwork-based research and how contingent events and ethical dilemmas may lead researchers to change the nature of their involvement with their empirical settings. The chapter examines the shifting affiliations and modes of participation that researchers may experience during research and returns to one of the key questions introduced in Chap. 2: to what extent can, and should, researchers align their ethics with those of the setting?

Public or Private

This chapter addresses the challenge of relating the public/private distinction to online environments and the implications of this for research. The chapter examines the significance of the distinction between the public and private for social science research and the varying strategies that researchers have developed for categorising online data in relation to this conceptual opposition. Tracing the distinction between perceived and technical approaches to the publicness/privateness of online environments and content, the chapter suggests that scholars pay attention to the expression of privacy in their research settings and marks out a distinction between explicit/implicit markers of privacy that can be recruited when approaching online environments.