What to pay attention to when we study Online Public Forums and Interactions among different age groups and especially regarding younger users - Research note as part of the ON-OFF Project ongoing workings.
From a strictly ethical point of view, it can be argued that discussions among members of online forums should be regarded as private, and any exploitation for the purposes of research & analysis, must dictate the informed consensus of the users it concerns.
A clear case for such conditions would be for forums that have a strictly private or semi-private communication space, mainly because of their self-helping nature for individuals suffering from diseases or which are victims of abuse.
When it comes to forums that have a different scope (cultural, religious, etc.) or ones containing discussion topics closer to societal related issues, same ethical rules do not apply.
The reason is essentially because open discussion forums aim mainly to engage new registered users by keeping the postings public and available for anyone to read. This justifies the consideration of communication as public behavior (Herring, 1996), which is intended to be regarded by as many other people as possible.
In regards to that, analyzing boards without the consent of online users that post and/or engage in discussion under such threads is not an ethical concern. Yet, it should not be disregarded that users and visitors of such public‘ forums may at least be annoyed by the possibility of their postings being analyzed in scientific research (King, 1996).
On that note, as researchers we should make sure not to unnecessary compromise the privacy of any individual user. For instance, nicknames of users must be deliberately left out in any sort of publication (scientific, online, etc.) as this could possibly make them identifiable. Similarly, literal quotes from the forums examined will also be avoided since they can lead back to the original posting through Internet search engines.