Linguistics research training - Essay Example

The ages between 16 and 18 are a grey area, and here care would have to be taken to ensure that the subject is mature enough to understand what is being proposed. If there is any doubt here, more stringent ethical decisions would have to be taken. Once the age issue is resolved, there are important questions about how public or private a website is intended to be. One way to decide this is to ask the question: “Are participants in this environment best understood as “subjects” (in the senses common in human subjects research in medicine and the social sciences) – or as authors whose texts/artifacts are intended as public?

(AoIR, 2002, p. 7). In some blogs and homepages the author is offering material for public view, with no password or other restrictions on viewing. In this case informed consent to research the website would have to be obtained from the owner. If there is a community involved, which assumes some kind of small group privacy, then permission from the whole group needs to be obtained: ““… the greater the acknowledged publicity of the venue, the less obligation there may be to protect individual privacy, confidentiality, right to informed consent, etc.

” (AoIR, 2002, p. . 9) Participants must have the right to withdraw at any point, and to see the results of any research which involves them. Task 2. Situation Two: Radio discourse research You choose to analyse a politician’s discourse as produced during a radio program. What ethical issues need to be resolved (if any)? Radio is a public medium and so there is no need to obtain the politician’s permission to study the discourse that is produced on the radio. Privacy or anonymity is not a concern in this case.

The radio company is a business, however, with rights such as copyright over the material it produces, and normally there are restrictions on what can be recorded from the air. Permission would have to be sought from the radio company either to use their recordings (preferable) or to make private recordings. Task 3. Situation Three: library research You choose to do a study on the discourse of SIN during the 2nd World War. What ethical issues need to be resolved (if any)? This is a tricky ethical issue because it involves contrasting moral definitions which are hard to pin down and analyse.

Depending on the method used, the researcher would need to disclose his/her own position either formally or implicitly. One way of doing this is to define the terminology of analysis very carefully, and contrast this with other definitions which are used in various sources. The data found in the library needs to be referenced thoroughly, to ensure that sources are acknowledged, but the researcher needs to reflect very carefully on the way that the topic is approached, the vocabulary used, and any hidden bias or prejudice that might creep in to the use of heavily loaded terms such as “sin.

” Matthews and Ross give good advice on this point, which should be heeded when