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Fedora: On Research Design

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Research design in anthropology is a tricky thing. It is the part of the process you do before you do anything else, and thus you do before you have any real sense of the situation in which you will be researching and the people with which you will be working. It is the place where you lay down the questions to be answered, setup ways in which you will attempt to answer them, try and anticipate all of the ins and outs of the process as well as all the steps necessary to be taken with all of the stakeholders, which in my case includes my client, my masters committee, and my university IRB.

Then you get into the project and start your research, and only then do you start to realize and understand what you’ve got yourself into and just how many things you didn’t anticipate. So far with this project, being a cyber anthropological based research study (all of the research is being conducted online), my problems have all centered around technology.

My first limitation was understanding the process to get my blog on the Fedora Planet blogroll. With help and some ‘hacking the system’ I got on and while at FUDcon I figured out why it didn’t work in the first place (I wasn’t a part of enough groups!).

Now I am realizing my second limitation, that of requiring a signed piece of paper from all interview participants before each interview can commence. Pen and paper is perhaps one of the oldest forms of communication and technology known to man and yet it is the one thing standing between me an several potential interviews.

This was not a hindrance I anticipated when designing my research study, and it is perhaps not something with which people who are not researching under a university have to deal. However, it is something I now realize is important and am bringing attention to in case there are others embarking on similar research studies with similar IRB limitations that require them to have signed consent forms so they can account for this process in their research design.

Were I to design a similar project in the future under the same IRB limitations, I would ask my IRB to approve an electronic encrypted signature on my consent forms.

Here’s to hoping someone out there can learn from my mistakes!

That all being said, if you have a means for returning a signed document to me electronically and you would like to be interviewed for the Fedora research project, but have yet to contact me please do so soon! All interviews will be wrapped up (as best they can) by Friday!

On interviewing minors online…

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My practicum research with Fedora officially started November 1st, however, I’ve used this entire week to try to talk my Institutional Review Board (the people who have to approve my research before I am allowed to do it) into allowing me to interview community participants who are under 18. In the eyes of the law anyone under 18 is considered a child, therefore I have to get their parental consent to participate.

Luckily, I met up with a very kind board advisor who worked out a plan with me that will allow me to get informed consent from parents via snail mail even though the interviews will take place online. He presented it to the  IRB chair for me and she agreed I could submit an amendment to my application and she would approve it under the plan we came up with. This is a HUGE step for any university as more and more research is likely to be conducted via virtual means than ever before.

For those who are interested in the plan we came up with, in case you would like to work something like this out with your IRB, here are the steps I must perform to gain parental consent.

  • I will present my client with a URL providing more information about the study telling parents we have selected their children to participate due to their involvement within the community.
  • My client will then send out this URL to the minors in the community who he believes make good interview candidates due to their high involvement requesting that their parents contact me if they are interested in participation.
  • The parents can then choose to ignore the request for participation or they can contact me via information provided to them on this URL letting me know they would like to give consent for their child to participate. This way I never have the contact information of the children and only those parents who agree to the participation of their children will be contacting me.
  • At that point I will request the snail mail address of the family and will be mailing physical copies of the IRB stamped consent forms to them for them to sign and send back to me. Only after I have received the signed form will I then be able to interview the minors.
  • On both my request for participation and my consent notice I am required to put the physical address of the anthropology office at the university in addition to the phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
  • Additionally, I have to make sure it is expressly clear that the parents are able to monitor the interview if they so choose.

This was a lot of hard work so I am happy to share it with anyone else who can take advantage of it!

Sadly, this also means I have yet to actually get on the Fedora blogroll as I still can’t figure out how to get my ssh key to work!

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