Getting ready for the ethics audit

Wellbeing in Europe Workspace
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I would like to revive this thread, and get the ethics audit going. There are two things we need to do:

  1. Put together documentation supporting the audit. I intend this post to be part of it (its “Start here”, in fact).
  2. Call a meeting after @markomanka has had a chance to review the documentation.

Narrative

The main narrative behind the documents that we provide is the following. In 2019, we gathered data through our usual process of convening a (multilingual, in this case) online conversation. Consent to participating in research is governed by the consent funnel. However, in POPREBEL’s case, the PIs @Jan and @Richard were not satisfied with the quality and pertinence of the data (most of the discussion had even been in English, which means that certain groups in Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany were underrepresented). We intended to ameliorate this situation by organizing onboarding events in the countries in question; they would get the project in contact with informants with the characteristics desired by the PIs, and onboard then onto the platform. But, in early 2020, COVID hit, and we could no longer do that.

So, we pivoted to more traditional field work. UCL hired ethnographers based in the three countries in question, with @amelia in a coordination role. Most of the data collected in 2020, 2021 and 2022 came through this new avenue.

We normally distinguish ethics issues for this type of work into two broad categories: consent to participating in research and data protection. With this new project architecture, the two categories are watched over by different organisations.

Consent to participating in research

This is now the province of UCL. Interviewers have been pointed to the materials used by Edgeryders (for example, how they can withdraw consent). The PIs were kept in this loop. Consent to participation has been acquired, as I understand it, via consent forms prepared by UCL. Could I ask @Richard (I suppose it’s you, Richard?) to point Marco to where you are keeping your consent forms?

Data encoding and data protection

This remains the province of Edgeryders. The methodological choice we made is to encode interview transcripts as if they were forum threads. Each question by the interviewer and each answer by the informant was treated as a separate post in that thread (example). The interviewer took care of creating a platform account for each informant, and attributing to that informant her or his answers. Pseudonyms were used as platform usernames.

There are two differences with our pre-2020 process:

  1. Email addresses are no longer collected. Interviewers have been using one-time email addresses to associate to the accounts they created.
  2. These threads have all been placed into restricted forum categories, invisible unless to users logged in egderyders.eu with the authorization to access those categories.

@markomanka, is there anything else you need?

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