Toward ethical cyberspace audience research: strategies for using the Internet for television audience studies.

The increasing dissemination of Internet technologies may provide the greatest revolution in the study of media audiences since critical media scholars began turning their attention to audiences in the early 1980s. As is often the case with new technologies and applications, computer-mediated communication (CMC) provides a previously unimaginable tool, but also forces a revision of the standards and practices that governed qualitative audience study prior to its introduction. Researchers in a variety of fields have begun adapting traditional methodological practices and ethics to the new research tool of CMC and the "field space" provided by the Internet, but using the Web to research audiences of television series poses specific challenges that this research has not addressed.

This particular article and the type of research it envisions require slightly revised concepts of field and audience. The changing nature of "going into the field" depends largely upon how researchers use the Internet and the new virtual spaces it offers. Throughout most of this article, we primarily focus on the Internet as a tool for research rather than as a space to research. In this approach, the Internet facilitates communication by helping to find audience members (who become respondents) and documenting their discussions of media texts. This makes Internet audience research unlike ethnography in many ways and much more akin to audience research that examines solicited letters or those sent to producers. (In other approaches, the space of the Internet functions more as a "field" because the research focuses on the spaces of the Internet or takes place in real time, as in the case of chat room discussions.)

But why open the Pandora's box of Internet-based audience research and what is to be gained? The Internet alleviates many logistical problems that seem insignificant singularly, but often compound until the complexity of an audience study detracts researchers from attempting these projects. However, Internet research simultaneously introduces new limitations, as researchers must be aware of who has the access, time, and knowledge to participate in Internet forums--especially when the research focuses on television viewers. Both the advantages and disadvantages acknowledged here illustrate the need for researchers to be reflexive and critical in research design and process. Internet-based audience research can be exceptionally helpful in gaining distinct snapshots of viewer response and understanding of texts. Broad analyses of various discussion forums for the same show may yield interesting contrasts or exceptional similarity, both findings that may be worthy of scholarly comment. The less labor intensive venue of Web forums may help researchers add audience study to a textual or institutional analysis, consequently expanding understandings of a show or phenomenon and increasing the voices heard.

Although a growing body of television audience research using Internet technologies is emerging, many studies have not specifically attended to the vast methodological variation encompassed among those who use "the Internet" in their studies. The works of Scodari (1998), Harris and Alexander (1998), Baym (2000), and Zweerink and Gatson (2002) illustrate the form and value of such studies but do not emphasize the specific ethical and/or methodological issues involved in this type of research. Instead, much of the work addressing ethical issues and Internet methodology has emerged in other academic fields, nonetheless providing invaluable guidelines that suggest starting points for the discussion of Internet audience research in the field of television studies (Ess & the AOIR Ethics Working Committee, 2002; Hine, 2000; Jones, 1999; Mann & Stewart, 2000; Markham, 1998). Consequently, we offer the following as the beginning of a conversation among researchers who use the Internet for audience research in order to build theory and method through frank dialogue about the methodological limits and challenges we face.

The following examination may raise more questions than it answers. This essay seeks to make the practice of turning to Internet forums for audience research problematic, while still acknowledging their value. Creating ethically responsible methodology is complex, and no one practice fits all. Ultimately, Web-based research requires that researchers consider the effects of their work and seek to minimize negative consequences for the communities they study. We emphasize the importance of reflexivity throughout the research process and developing multi-sited research projects as two key strategies. In the limited space here, we focus on strategies characteristic of reflexivity, but comment briefly on multi-sited research methods in the conclusion.

Issues for Ethical Cyberspace Methods

We identify three primary methodological factors that make Internet research fundamentally different from that done in the "real world:" the issue of perceived privacy, the option of gaining consent or lurking, and the challenge of balancing anonymity with data accessibility. We discuss existing scholarship that explores these methodological issues and our experiences in order to outline strategies for conducting ethical research that utilizes feminist methodologies. The breadth of relevant literature is much more extensive than that cited here; rather, we acknowledge key works and emphasize examples drawn from our experiences.

Perceived Privacy

Online communication is often seductive. When sitting alone, typing at a computer, and contributing to a strand of discussion including only a few discussants, individuals may have a sense that their contribution is private when it is not. King (1996) describes perceived privacy as the "degree to which group members perceive their message to be private," and acknowledges that variance in perceived privacy depends upon context. He offers academic e-mail discussion groups as spaces with low expectations of privacy and support groups and discussions organized around a socially sensitive subject as spaces with high perceived privacy (p. 126). The inability to know who is "there" in the discussion space--but not actively contributing (a practice referred to as "lurking")--additionally confuses perceptions of privacy. In many contexts, including sites featuring audience discussion, contributors may have a high sense of perceived privacy because a discussion occurs among a few people, with no indication of how many are lurking, or that the discussion could be archived and available for years after the posting.

In a similar vein, Waskul and Douglass (1996) offer the distinctions of "privately public" and "publicly private" online interaction spaces in order to address the way that "public and private spheres become conceptually and experientially blurred, as the medium increasingly embodies neither, but both" (p. 131). This blurring provides a significant consideration for determining the ethics of fair use and access. Although in legal terms, many Web-based message boards in which viewers discuss series are "public" spaces (accessible to anyone who finds them), ethically, researchers must consider how contributors often experience these spaces as private. Waskul and Douglass argue that "the publicness of a context does not preclude the emergence of private interactions, is not a sufficient license to invade the privacy of others, and does not relieve the researcher from ethical commitments of informing participants of research intent" (p. 133). In a similar analysis, Sixsmith and Murray (2001) illustrate the complicated interconnections among privacy, ownership, and authorship in online communication interconnections that make it difficult, if not impossible, to privilege all of these concerns in constructing an ethical research project. Significantly, sociologists (particularly those studying aspects of health) have offered much of the existing scholarship considering the ethics of accounting for perceived privacy, and many of the examples used in their articles are of a more intimate nature than most discussions of a television series. Ultimately, researchers must uphold a standard of protecting participants from harm as the guiding factor in making methodological decisions.

Informed Consent and Lurking