Hmmm what does it matter to you? I’m just a silly, overly morally righteous troll who can’t separate fiction from reality, right? I got curious because I wanted to see if all my time spent in those ivory towers of higher ed studying writing and literature is what’s causing some of the fundamental disconnect in approaches and understandings of those approaches to this work.
Well, I’m not. If I were I indeed would’ve clarified that but, like I said, I am just curious because of the aforementioned reasons. Though I have thought about using the various discussions I have had with people as data, I’m a bit too lazy to consciously and deliberately collect anything right now, much less break down and categorize it…
What, now we care about ethics? In the first place you’re all already anonymous by virtue of your usernames, I doubt anyone here is using their real names. You’d possibly be rendered even more anonymous by stripping you of your usernames altogether and referring to you as “user 1, user 2, user 3” etc. All the info here is also publicly available, so it wouldn’t be as if I’d privately recorded an interview containing sensitive information and released it to the public without my interviewee knowing…hell, someone else entirely could do this kind of thing and factor me and my responses into it as well.
The other thing that would make research like that a bit challenging is determining how genuine people’s answers are, although if I was conducting more formal interviews or putting out a more formal questionnaire—well I did attempt something like the latter before—that might change a bit. Still, there’d be something worthwhile in how people responded regardless, and conclusions you could draw from them, even if that conclusion is ultimately that they didn’t take the line of inquiry seriously
That’s true, most people are anonymous on these types of sites. Research can be done on anonymous data with certain expectations, such as having a low level of engagement with users. A researcher who has a high level could direct the data in their favour, and it impacts consent from an ethical standpoint. It ultimately depends on the approval of the ethics committee your research is affiliated with. An issue is that it’s highly unlikely that researchers who have a fairly high level of engagement and are anonymous are going to admit that. Another issue, as you pointed out, is the truthfulness of the data you collect. Things like this is why I view some peer-reviewed research with skepticism.
How many readers here have been to or graduated from university? Just curious.