The Ethical Challenges of Researching Primary School Children’s Online Activities: A New Ethical Paradigm for the Virtual Ethnographer?
The Ethical Challenges of Researching Primary School Children’s Online Activities: A New Ethical Paradigm for the Virtual Ethnographer?

Summary/Abstract: The intention of this theoretical paper is to explore a range of common ethical paradigms with regard to researching the educational potential of web-based communication tools. This work has evolved out of research into the educational use of online communities within the English primary school context. The main argument within this paper is that the virtual ethnographer faces a number of ethical challenges which are the product of the complex interplay between three key factors; the attitudes towards web-based technologies adopted by the researcher; those adopted by the participants and; the particular opportunities and idiosyncrasies afforded by the process of virtual ethnography itself. The paper examines this interplay beginning with an exploration of the interface between researchers and researched; how can the researcher justify their work ethically within a culture of no risk towards the educational use of web-based communication tools? Classroom practitioners and the wider educational establishment are often understandably circumspect in their willingness to explore the potential of web-based technologies due to certain well publicised risks surrounding the use of such technologies as chat rooms. However could the rate of children’s adoption of such technologies outside of formal education render the educational establishment’s wariness of these tools, ethically untenable? Another particular ethical challenge faced by the virtual ethnographer, I will go onto argue, evolves out of the very nature of web-based technologies and the opportunities they might yield. For example, I will explore how the affordances within the virtual field of study take the debate over covert and overt methods into new realms with such distinctions becoming increasingly difficult to apply within virtual arenas where there is a total absence of physical presence and the visual cues we take for granted within face-to-face settings. The paper draws upon a range of contributors to the ethical debate in educational research and calls for a new ethical awareness amongst educational researchers, in which some of the common ethical standpoints within the educational research community are reevaluated from the perspective of potentially new research methods afforded by web-based technologies. It concludes by expressing the need for a new dynamic ethical relativism in order for educational research to keep up with fast-changing technologies and shifting perceptions of their use within the wider community .

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