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expectations is supported by strategies forwarded,
for example, by Ess (2003) that emphasize an effort
to empathically understand and support, so far as
possible, the perspectives and views of one's group
of study. This is, more broadly, a form of the golden
rule, which, whatever its complications in praxis,
remains an important guideline for ethical behavior.
Doucet and Mauthner (2002) develop two
arguments that point to concrete ways of conducting
ethical research practice, as well as to dilemmas that
occur while attempting to do so. The first argument
focuses on research relationship. The second
argument is about ethical issues of accountability.
The fact that research respondents are not a
homogenous group can be an additional dilemma.
They argue that research may be best served by
situational or contextualized ethics.
Ethics in qualitative research examines the
theoretical and practical aspects of ethical dilemmas
in qualitative research. For many researchers, ethics
has been associated with following ethical
guidelines and gaining ethics approval from
academic bodies. However, the complexities of
researching private lives and placing accounts in the
public arena increasingly raise ethical issues, which
are not easily solved by rules and guidelines. This
study addresses the gap between traditional ethical
principles and online research practice that inform it,
focusing on exploring ethical issues in research from
a range of angles, including access and informed
consent, and tensions between being a professional
researcher and a caring professional (Doucet and
Mauthner, 2002; Capurro and Pingel, 2002; Ess,
2003). Thus, this study comes out with a conclusion
that being ethical in online research practice
involves varied degrees of four ethical factors,
namely responsibility, accountability, caring and
relationship. Electronic qualitative research is
effective if it encompasses simultaneously the four
factors just mentioned as a norm for ethics online. In
the light of the online ethical norm, ethical principles
are important for conducting an electronic
qualitative research.
Thus, it is important to adopt old principles for a
new ethics or new laws on the Internet. The
principles are equality, non-discrimination in access
and use; inviolability, or the inadmissibility of
intentional harm against humans and liberty, or
absence of external coercion or constraints that
obstruct self-determination (Hamelink, 2000). In
other words, doing online research is not much
different from doing any research (Jones, 2003).
Yet the Internet poses several challenges in
attempting to identify and measure benefits and
risks. More work is needed on defining what
constitutes benefits and risks in Internet research.
Thus, there is a need to balance the interest and to
specify priorities while doing online research.
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