An update on EFRESH

We are a few months into the EFRESH project and are embarking on our initial data collection. We are looking for a range of people to interview, so please read on and get in touch if you are interested. 

We have spent a great deal of time as a team thinking about and discussing the responsibility and ethical focus of our project, including why we feel that this project is so important. As researchers we need to ensure that research with potentially controversial, harmful or vulnerable communities can be carried out in good faith, without bias and without harm, both to research participants and to researchers. In the rest of this blog we will talk about why we feel that the particular focus on researchers of internet communities is vital. 

We recognise that many of the potential engagement and safeguarding issues that we identify will be shared by researchers of online and offline communities, however focusing on people who study internet communities in particular, allows us to highlight particularities of the online world. Research into online communities is a huge area with growing interest from people in multiple disciplines, due in part to the fact that much of our social activity has been and is moving online, especially after the pandemic. We must understand the implications that carrying out the research might have on researchers and ensure that we can protect them from harm.

Researchers of online communities have reported a range of harms, especially from communities that respond negatively to being scrutinised, which may be physically, mentally, and reputationally harmful. These include posting detailed personal information about the researcher, sending abusive or threatening messages to the researcher and their family and friends, creating and sharing images and posting false information about the researcher online. Additionally, these issues most often affect more vulnerable researchers such as junior researchers, researchers of colour, females, and LGBTQIA+ researchers. 

It is much easier to remain anonymous in an online community, which can exacerbate problems of harassment and encourage people to post things that they would not necessarily say in an offline context. Online communities can also contain many thousands of participants, often with quite niche shared interests, and this may raise the potential for multiple people to ‘gang up’ on others, including researchers. However, paradoxically, it may also be easier to find out detailed information about a researcher that engages with an online community, linking them across multiple websites and communities. 

Currently, safeguarding of researchers who study online communities is lacking within institutions, whereas there may be detailed guidelines and protections for those studying ‘real world’ phenomena. As such, we are particularly interested in identifying best practices for research in this area that can be shared with others. Through our research we plan to produce guidance for researchers and research institutions to address these (and other) challenges, so we would like to hear about your experiences of what was successful and what you would change. If you’re interested please do get in touch via Horizons website ‘Contact Us’ page.

Tags: internet, online, online communities, safeguarding