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Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009, 09:22 am
Discipline and publish
I’ve been thinking a lot about this fan/sex survey thing going around. I found the kink_bingo mods’ response compelling, but I have a couple of concerns to add. First, institutional review boards (IRBs) are bad. [ETA: I'm leaving this in for accuracy, but it really was an overstatement that I should have avoided. I still believe IRBs are not generally fit for purpose, but that doesn't make every IRB bad, especially when discipline-specific standards are applied.] They’re bad for social science and they’re bad for ethical thought, too often substituting medical models for the best, most informed debate within a particular discipline. Not everyone is subject to an obligation to do no harm (think historians: should they care about the sensibilities of the Kennedy family?), and IRBs often don’t know what the relevant risks of harm from a particular course of research even are. I occasionally need reminding of this bit of trivia: the Stanford Prison Experiment—a core example of what IRBs are supposed to avoid—was IRB-approved. It was stopped because (one of) the experimenters recognized a violation of their own professional ethics. One could persuasively argue that reporting the netporn survey authors to the IRB is a viable strategic move, attempting to enlist a more powerful entity against people who have more social/educational capital than pseudonymous fans are perceived to have. I still think this is a mistake, because IRBs use the very same totalizing, naturalizing models of personhood, risk, and harm that the original kink_bingo response so powerfully deconstructed. Fans can assert the entitlement to be disciplined only on their own terms, and I think we should, but the IRB move goes against that commitment. Second, I think vidders’ recent debates about visibility are relevant here. Fanwork creators are visible: Hollywood knows, lawyers know, the Simpsons writers know, teachers know. This means that nonfannish (and non-antifannish) academics are going to follow their noses to us once in a while, no matter what. We can and probably should put greater trust in our homegrown academics (a set that overlaps with, but is not identical to, fan theorists) than in outsiders, and we can definitely decide not to help educate outsiders—or to do so. None of us individually has any obligation either way, nor do we have a community obligation to explain ourselves or to stay silent. But beyond reaction to this survey, I suggest we should think about the benefits of visibility as well as the risks. Social scientists, like the proverbial drunk under the lamppost looking for his keys, like to go where the data are. If—and it’s a huge, difficult if—visibility dispels the stereotypes that fannish pleasures don’t exist/are somehow flawed/etc., then that’s a good result, and it won’t happen without some kind of visibility. Francesca Coppa has made the point that vidders do well in the art world and the legal advocacy community because vidders are organized, articulate, and show up to talk about their interests. When you become a prototype, social policy starts being made around you. (Or against you. This isn’t inevitable or riskless.) Any subcultural group that asserts the entitlement to define its own worth, I suspect, ends up with its liberals (me) and its radicals (kink_bingo mods, I think, but that’s my characterization). Because I think it’s inevitable, I’m more interested in talking about strategic moves and self-understanding than in convincing anyone to do anything—other than, here, rethinking the deployment of the IRB. Comments on LJ
 comments on DW
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 02:25 pm (UTC)
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) villeinage
This entire issue is nuanced, and I know you to be a nuanced thinker, BUT I can't let a blanket statement like : IRB's are bad stand unchallenged. I am old enough to remember the bad old days before IRB's, when any student and his/her prof could design pretty much any social science experiment that didn't overtly break the law. Protocols and ethical debates were just emerging, but plenty of squicky things routinely got done in the name of SCIENCE! Deceptive social research (lying to research subjects about what you were studying) was the NORM, not the exception. On a personal note, I gave up pursuing an academic career in the social sciences because of the paradigm of deception: I didn't want to do deceptive research, but I needed research creds to move up the ladder (get publishing credits, get into grad school,) and in my undergraduate institution, there was one ethicist in the laughably small philosophy department looking at the issue of deceptive research protocols in social science research. I also remember being a research subject in the bad old days, and learning pretty quickly to distrust ANYTHING researchers told me about what they were studying. For example: Filling out what was a purported to be a questionnaire--only to find out that what was being examined was: body language, and that I had been taped (without consent) during the entire session. Pretty creeptastic. Vis a vis the arguments on risk/benefit of fandom visibility--well, that's a somewhat different discussion, in my opinion.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 03:34 pm (UTC)
jonquil
"Deceptive social research (lying to research subjects about what you were studying) was the NORM, not the exception." When I was in college (1977-81), Psych 1 students had to do a student-participating survey to pass the course. (You knew who your true friends were, because they'd volunteer to take your survey.) They *always* lied about what they were studying. Always. This was at the baby level, of course, but it wasn't a good precedent. They disclosed what they'd really been up to afterward; I don't know if this was the standard of good practice at that period or not.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 03:59 pm (UTC)
rivkat
IRBs still routinely approve deception! There are protocols for doing it and everything! Sample statement. Nor do I think that deception about the research topic is always wrong. Observation alters behavior, so sometimes you need to misdirect attention.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:07 pm (UTC)
jonquil
Cool. I withdraw the earlier comment; I was wrong. However -- this is unrelated to my earlier wrongness -- the page you linked me to says "However, some studies do present a risk of social harm (e.g., harm to a subject's reputation, which is sometimes a danger if confidentiality is not maintained)" This is, and has been from the beginning, one of my primary concerns. These people have made no visible attempt to protect the confidentiality of their data. They have, in fact, broken what little anonymity they promised themselves. I have seen no evidence that the security at the commercial site they're using for the survey is sufficient to protect people's answers to sensitive and, yes, career-damaging information; their own behavior makes it clear that it is possible to connect the cookie used to answer the supposedly anonymous survey and the IP address used to post to LiveJournal.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:33 pm (UTC)
rivkat
These are important points, particularly the use of the cookie. I just want to make clear that IRBs are bad places to look for sensitivity to the real concerns. Unless someone who knows something about pseudonymity happens to be on the IRB (which is unlikely; they're usually doctors and nurses), the IRB is likely to think just like these guys probably did: at most they're connecting the answers to a pseudonym, not a real person, just like they'd feel free to connect results to "Patient #234."
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:37 pm (UTC)
jonquil
Gotcha. So, the next time something like this happens (absit omen!) it would be more appropriate to go to the department chair?
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:47 pm (UTC)
rivkat
That would be my instinct, or even to enlist someone at the same university or in the same discipline--we're everywhere, even pseudonymously!
Wed, Sep. 2nd, 2009 04:33 am (UTC)
belladonnalin
I just want to jump in a little here - I plan on commenting more fully on all of this when I'm at my own computer and not commenting on a friends' - I have seen this assertion a few times, that IRBs are staffed entirely of doctors and nurses, and I wanted to give my perspective. I've gone through IRBs at two universities (Gonzaga University in Washington state in the US and the University of Manchester in the UK) and in the middle of going through one at Eastern Washington University. My experience at all of these universities as a social science researcher doing research on human subjects was that my IRB was entirely consisting of social science researchers. So, in the case at all of my institutions, the IRBs were staffed of people who understood the disciplinary norms of my field (which is interdisciplinary, so it could be more problematic) and who had research experience in that field.
Wed, Sep. 2nd, 2009 04:44 am (UTC)
rivkat
Absolutely there are institutions with separate IRBs for different kinds of research, and those do much better, though they're still subject to bureaucratic pressures. Poking around BU, they appear to have a medical and a nonmedical division, but with joint administration; hard to tell how that works and the forms for everyone are identical, which means that they're written with the medical model primary. It's certainly possible that it's implemented sensitively at any given institution, but at that point I want to know why centralized administration is required when so much of the apparatus doesn't fit social science models.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:20 pm (UTC)
villeinage
Yes, I agree. But the standards are more stringent now than they were, and the considerations of risk/benefit are greater.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:37 pm (UTC)
rivkat
I really don't think that IRBs are the right place to look for standards. Some links to discussions of research. Edited at 2009-09-01 04:37 pm (UTC)
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 05:37 pm (UTC)
villeinage
I liked the links that you provided. They will definitely give me something to think through, especially in terms of the need for open-ended procedures and ethical inquiries, and also the inconsistent way standards are applied. My own field can map onto the medical model pretty well, so perhaps less of a concern. A discussion of feeling constrained by IRB procedures does not appear to have filtered into the wider conversation in my profession. I'll acknowledge that I'm clinical, and not academic, but I swim in the wider waters of net discussion. Still, I'm sure I'm missing out on lots of grad/post-doc/and inter/intra-university conversation, so maybe the discussions are happening there, and haven't made it out, yet. I see your point in this. IRB or not, it seems that this fandom survey violates the regulations about thoroughly protecting anonymity and about placing subjects at risk for criminal and civil prosecution. Ick to that aspect, still.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 03:47 pm (UTC)
rivkat
But IRBs aren't necessary (or sufficient) for ethical maturity in research. In fact, by generalizing from the medical model, they inhibit discussion and development of discipline specific ethics. I don't know any social scientist who emerged from mandatory IRB training--about medical ethics, with the required quizzes on things like Nazi experiments--with respect for the IRB process, as opposed to weary tolerance. In practice, IRBs focus on things they can control, like spelling and grammar in proposals, rather than serious investigation of ethical codes with which they are not familiar (e.g., the folklorists', the historians'). Disciplinary ethics are great, but IRBs aren't the way to get them.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 03:57 pm (UTC)
villeinage
I do understand, and can appreciate the differences between idealized ethics and what is practiced, and the entire issue of unintended consequences.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:01 pm (UTC)
jonquil
" In practice, IRBs focus on things they can control, like spelling and grammar in proposals, rather than serious investigation of ethical codes with which they are not familiar" That's a really important (and new) piece of information for me. Thank you. Now that I think of it, I have never attended a "how not to get us sued for sex/race/... discrimination" class that taught me anything other than "Corporation is checking off a box so as not to get sued".
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:16 pm (UTC)
rivkat
A reference for the spelling/grammar thing.
Wed, Sep. 2nd, 2009 02:22 am (UTC)
ithiliana
And, again, it is absolutely opposite to my experiences on my university IRB committee. Yes, there is a CYA (cover your ass) component to IRB. But that still leaves a wide range of competencies, practices, and cultures.
Wed, Sep. 2nd, 2009 02:31 am (UTC)
rivkat
I have every confidence that there are people who are using IRBs to have useful ethical conversations, and that your IRB is a model, but that doesn't make them on balance a good idea given the costs--which do include oversight of spelling and application of medical "do no harm" ethics to nonmedical disciplines--and the alternatives. Does the wide range of IRBs do better than disciplinary ethics would? There seems to me little reason to think it does, and many reasons to think it doesn't.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 03:31 pm (UTC)
jonquil
It's fascinating to me to see a different take on IRBs. I have heard a lot of IRB horror stories, from you as well as others. However, I've also heard a lot of pre-IRB horror stories, about subjects who actually were damaged by researchers. I'm happy to believe that IRBs are a bad solution to a bad problem, but I need it acknowledged that the problem exists. In this particular case, the researchers are violating research ethics. They called the survey anonymous, and then they responded to people's LJ entries, connecting their survey responses with their LJ entries. They did this twice. They made no attempt whatever to exclude minors from the survey, and they asked sexually explicit questions. They asked triggering questions, and then they defended those questions as being scientifically necessary. When somebody not only does research you don't like, but does research that is unethical, where do you turn if not the IRB?
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 03:56 pm (UTC)
rivkat
I said this above, sorry for the repetition: "IRBs aren't necessary (or sufficient) for ethical maturity in research. In fact, by generalizing from the medical model, they inhibit discussion and development of discipline specific ethics. I don't know any social scientist who emerged from mandatory IRB training--about medical ethics, with the required quizzes on things like Nazi experiments--with respect for the IRB process, as opposed to weary tolerance. In practice, IRBs focus on things they can control, like spelling and grammar in proposals, rather than serious investigation of ethical codes with which they are not familiar (e.g., the folklorists', the historians'). Disciplinary ethics are great, but IRBs aren't the way to get them." There's an interesting discussion going on at John Tierney's NYT blog (which I hate to refer people to, but oh well) about a study that deceived kids into thinking that they'd broken a valuable toy, then immediately debriefed them; a lot of the outside reaction was "how awful!" but parents and participants spoke up to point out that they didn't have any lasting trauma. IRBs are not good at identifying triggers because they are unlikely to have the relevant expertise. The solution, if there is one (Sturgeon's law applies to research too), is disciplinary, which means that I'd direct complaints to the researchers and to the department, not to the IRB. That may mean the researchers don't listen, but we're doing a pretty good signal boost within fandom. One of the bad things about IRBs is that they lift ethical responsibility from disciplines--the result of complaints to the department may well be the same as going to the IRB, fobbing responsibility onto the IRB--but I don't believe that IRBs are where fans will be protected. The fannish researchers I've seen generally do things the IRB would never think of, much less require, to protect fannish norms. (And while I totally understand the desire to protect minors, given (a) how minor fans are likely to find out about the survey, if the places I've seen it mentioned are representative, and (b) what I was reading when I was 14, I don't think the survey is going to expose minor fans to anything more harmful than its assumptions.)
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:01 pm (UTC)
villeinage
Look, they affiliated themselves with a university, and they implied that their study had, in fact, undergone IRB process. In other words, these researchers were hiding under the guise of at least giving their subjects the nominal protection of institutional scrutiny.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:12 pm (UTC)
rivkat
I don't think these guys approached the project properly, that's for sure. But I also don't think that most of the fans invoking the IRB are familiar with the relevant ethical codes and IRB procedures (and why would they be? most fans have no reason to know this stuff!). In fact, many researchers are arguing for, and at some universities receiving, broad IRB exemptions for internet surveys, though this one might not qualify for those exemptions. If they were misleading people about IRB scrutiny, that's a wrong, but I think the real critique is the fannish one: your questions don't fit our ethics. Put it this way: if the IRB approved this survey--not at all unlikely--would we have any fewer objections? I doubt it.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:31 pm (UTC)
jonquil
"But I also don't think that most of the fans invoking the IRB are familiar with the relevant ethical codes and IRB procedures " As you know, welcome to the dogpile. Some people advance the debate, while others merely repeat it; that's the nature of an Internet firestorm. I certainly don't know the full ins and outs of what is ethical and unethical research, which is why I contacted the IRB. Again, when I see somebody doing something that is genuinely potentially damaging to individuals -- answers like "have you smoked marijuana after reading fanfiction?" can be extremely damaging -- and making no guarantees of data security or integrity, there are genuine risks that have nothing to do with fandom's dislike of being put under a microscope by unsympathetic observers. The question has been asked, over and over again, what have you done to protect your users, what have you done to protect your data, have you talked to an IRB. People who are intimately familiar with IRBs have asked these questions and been met with silence, or in one case "we value the IRB process", while complaints about individual questions have been answered.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:42 pm (UTC)
rivkat
Fair enough. Given that we're talking about IRBs, though, I wanted to offer a counterperspective: the IRB is unlikely to value the things we value, and endorsing IRB control of Internet-based research has serious costs both for legitimate fan research and for non-fan research, so I do not think the IRB is the right tool to deal with this particular problematic research endeavor.
Wed, Sep. 2nd, 2009 02:23 am (UTC)
ithiliana
Thank you: this means I don't have to go dig up those links. Do "most" of the people commenting know IRBs? No. But quite a few do, most importantly from the perspectives of different disciplines at at least two nations (US and Canada).
Wed, Sep. 2nd, 2009 02:37 am (UTC)
rivkat
I have not gone through all the discussions. But what I've seen has two components which I think should be separated: (1) Ethics, including fannish ethics--most of the fan researchers I've seen do things IRBs have no clue about, because the ethics of fan communities are different. (2) IRB review. Many IRBs do assert jurisdiction over any kind of surveys, but others don't, for good reasons (and consistent with federal regs, which exempt a bunch of surveys and don't require the IRB to decide which research is exempt, though again many institutions require mini-review to prove exemption). (If you're arguing pure rules, I'm not sure what Canadian regs would prove.) I've seen very good arguments about (1), but nothing that convinces me on (2).
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:36 pm (UTC)
villeinage: Good point!
I think the real critique is the fannish one: your questions don't fit our ethics.This is a good point, and I agree, this has been a very strong trend in fannish criticism of the survey. it's also been a naive critique, in some ways. As some have pointed out,and I agree, these guys are trolling for salacious quotes for their pop-science book, under the thin guise of research. There's no actual research happening here. (The fannish conversation reminds me, in a way, of the futility of the conversations that can occur in the feminist blogosphere, when some jerkwad guy shows up, somebody tried to edumacate him, and the conversation derails from there. Mostly, the guy was trolling.) Put it this way: if the IRB approved this survey--not at all unlikely--would we have any fewer objections? I doubt it.You're right,I think, in terms of the fannish objections to the heterocentric/sexist/ignorant of fannish culture nature of the questions. I don't think this survey would have made it past an IRB, because I don't think the intention was to do science. I object to the deception that this is real,actual research. I want these guys to suffer the consequences of pretending to do research, and using their university prestige/connections to shelter them while they either jerk off to fannish comments or skim quotes for their future readers to jerk off to (either literally or metaphorically.) I was not really clear about that.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:46 pm (UTC)
rivkat: Re: Good point!
I agree that these guys are not looking to understand fan cultures. Unfortunately, the IRB is unlikely to penalize them for being titillated! That is, the very things you hate (being objectified) will not read as problematic to the IRB, which exists to regularize and enable research that deals with people as autonomous, individualized, contextless units. The IRB is more likely to tell a folklorist that what she's doing isn't really research than it is to reject brain science.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 05:01 pm (UTC)
villeinage: Re: Good point!
My point is that with informed consent procedures, and shelters/protections for minors, and security measures to protect anonymity-- questions regarding explicit, personal sexual behavior and illegal drug use would be unlikely to have been approved. None of these protections were present. Of course there is institutionally-sanctioned research that is premised on objectification and titillation. And I think that fannish culture needs to be mindful of how much of an outlier culture we unfortunately still are, at least in terms of US majority culture. In terms of what we value and valorize, our PhDs are not their PhDs.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 07:31 pm (UTC)
rivkat: Re: Good point!
I think we're on the same page with respect to privacy/data security. But I am deeply distrustful of IRBs that dictate question content. Questions regarding sexual behavior and drug use still do get asked, and should be asked, because they can be really important especially to communities that get ignored in dominant stories.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 09:03 pm (UTC)
villeinage: Re: Good point!
I seem to be having some semantic fragmentation in my writing, today. Yes, of course research can ask explicit/intrusive questions! But the risks to the subjects should be taken into consideration, identities protected, etc. I want to see visible procedures in place, and for subjects to have recourse. The best format for ensuring this? I don't know.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:03 pm (UTC)
jonquil
"(And while I totally understand the desire to protect minors, given (a) how minor fans are likely to find out about the survey, if the places I've seen it mentioned are representative, and (b) what I was reading when I was 14, I don't think the survey is going to expose minor fans to anything more harmful than its assumptions.)" No, but when you do research of any kind on minors, aren't you required to get parental consent?
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:19 pm (UTC)
villeinage
when you do research of any kind on minors, aren't you required to get parental consent?Yes. Even back when I did grad research without an IRB, that was the standard.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:24 pm (UTC)
brewsternorth
Yeah, the pollsters claimed they didn't need to worry their heads about that because they weren't conducting the poll among minors. Which was a fallacy on its face, since (short of actually querying LJ user by user for their dates of birth) there was nothing on the survey, apparently, to forbid under-18s, or wherever the "minors" benchmark is set for these things, from participating.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:25 pm (UTC)
rivkat
This is beyond my expertise, and my reading of the regs is uninformed, but my quick pass at an answer is: yes, if the minor is below the age of consent to the treatments or procedures involved in the research. The regs are written to the medical model, as indicated by the reference to treatments/procedures. If we analogize from COPPA, the children's privacy protection law, then 13 would be the age of consent to revealing personal information. The survey doesn't explicitly collect personal information (I set aside the apparent breach of confidentiality in linking responses to LJ names, which is an independent wrong), though, so it's hard to say. Best practice would clearly be to tell people under 13 not to take it.
Wed, Sep. 2nd, 2009 04:43 am (UTC)
belladonnalin
Sorry to jump in - this is one area that I do have experience in. Not always. The standard is absolutely parental consent and that is the easiest way to get passed, so most people use it. However, there are research cases where the parents cannot or will not give consent, where the parent is unavailable, and/or where contacting the parent could put the youth in danger (research of sexual orientation in minors has run into this problem, as has research in youth gangs and homeless youth). In these cases, the researchers have to justify not getting parental consent, how they will protect the privacy of the minors (privacy of minors is more important than that of adults in social science research, which brings the cookie concern into even more importance), and how they will protect the minors from psychological, physical, or legal harm. I had a proposal passed through the IRB at the University of Manchester where I refused to get parental consent for the participation of minors (because it was possible that it would put the youth in danger and because it negated part of the point of the research, which was personal agency through political participation). But it took a huge written argument and justification and the things I had to have in place to protect the subjects (including some written instructions, clarification, and resources) are not in place in this study.
Wed, Sep. 2nd, 2009 05:05 am (UTC)
jonquil
Thanks for the clarification. Makes total sense.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:16 pm (UTC)
villeinage
I can counter that with my equally compelling or uncompelling, I suppose, piece of anecdata that more than 30 years past the fact, I still remember how I felt discovering that I had been taped without consent. Damaged? No. Revolted and creeped out. Yes. And the argument from the ethical point of view was also made, again over 30 years ago, that individual psychic damage or not, there is damage to the level of trust in society/culture, and that that is a significant consequence. And I'm sorry, fields of study were NOT doing anything to police themselves on their own. Lazy-ass research was the result. No-one had to come up with creative or innovative research design, and there was a whole lot of wink-wink nudge-nudge I really can't get my results any other way going on. This is not to say that there has not been a lot of advances going on in terms of ethical research, or that fields of study that are not medical don't map 100% onto the medical model in terms of human research ethics. But even as late as 1990, when I finally got my graduate degree in a health-allied field, there was no IRB at my University to police human research.There was no deception, obvs, we were trying to replicate another study on a different demographic, but (minor) subjects' parents had to sign permission forms, and that's it. But geez Louize. When I think of it now. We had one prof signing approving the research design and were doing unsupervised research with children. Thank heavens that's not the standard of practice now.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 04:27 pm (UTC)
rivkat
OK, but feeling creeped out is not always reason to avoid research--it depends on the research. Historians and biographers, for example, hurt people all the time. And IRBs routinely approve deception. I absolutely agree that reflection on when deception is worth the moral cost is important, but I disagree that IRBs are the place to do it.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 03:53 pm (UTC)
marici
I've heard about the Zimbardo prison experiment from Zimbardo, and your comments make me think I need a source for a more critical view. If you have a reference for a critique, particularly one that suggests it should have never happened at all, I'd like to read it.
Wed, Sep. 2nd, 2009 02:39 am (UTC)
rivkat
My most useful informant on this doesn't do behavioral psych; he suggests that people tend to mention the Stanford Prison Experiment in passing but he hasn't read a detailed treatment of it.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 05:31 pm (UTC)
cesperanza
Normally I'm 100 percent in agreement with you and this position vis a vis IRB, as you know! The reason I'm inclined to ask the question about IRBs here is because of their insistence that they are not doing anything literary, cultural, or historical (all of which are inappropriate for IRBs, IMO) or even anthropological (also inappropriate for IRB, as anthropology as a discipline typially has a more cogent ethics standard than IRB ) but are in fact trying to find out something about "the brain" in what they're claiming is a pseudo-medical-scientific way (unlike all the neuroscientists *I* know, btw, all of whom are incredibly theoretically and culturally sophisticated). To me, its a live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-sword thing: if you're going to claim that you don't have to read any theoretical books about fandom or fanfiction or to know the community and its practices or be familiar with the art or its politics or gender theory etc. etc. because this is not a cultural study but "hard science"/a fascinating "data" set, then it seems to me fair play to say, OK, scientists: show me your paperwork for doing "hard science" on "human subjects."
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 07:35 pm (UTC)
rivkat
Right, I see the appeal, and yet I think the more powerful position was that staked out by the kink_bingo mods. Even people with bad research models can be doing exempt survey research; just means they have a crappy survey. Meanwhile, I think resort to the IRB reinforces the idea that there is some set of norms out there, and that set is not going to be favorable to us.
Tue, Sep. 1st, 2009 07:40 pm (UTC)
nestra
I think we can all agree that the kink_bingo mods pwned them. It was a thing of beauty.
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