Posts Tagged ethics

CFP: The Ethics of Fan Studies

Posted by admin in Publications on June 1st, 2010

Kathy Larsen teaches celebrity studies and fan studies at George Washington University.in Washington D.C. She is the Popular Culture Association Area Chair for Fan Theory and Culture. With Lynn Zubernis, she is currently completing Fangasm.

John Walliss is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, and Director of the Centre for Millennialism Studies, at Liverpool Hope University, UK.

The CFP is here.

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Post rec: “Wearing the juice”

Posted by admin in Meta on September 3rd, 2009

This excellent post at Rough Theory tells us everything we should never do in fan studies:

Assuming this mess is not some sort of elaborate research-themed performance art, or the result of a revenge-fuelled identity theft, researchers Ogi Ogas and partner Sai Chaitanya Gaddam are trying their best to demonstrate to the world that they are something like the academic research equivalent to Wheeler. They have blundered into an online community whose members write and read, among other things, erotically-themed fan fiction, and have presented community members with a poorly-designed questionnaire (now taken down, but for a while being modified on the fly as people lined up with complaints about the research design - participants have posted screenshots and a text version of the survey after its initial modifications - note that a number of the final option responses and some other warnings and qualifications seem to have been added in response to criticisms of the survey in its original form - the modifications are often palpably different in style from the original text).

Among many other problems, the questionnaire asks respondents to provide sensitive information about sexual habits, desires and fantasies, in a setting where the questionnaire could be accessed by minors, without - as far as I can tell - having vetted the research design with their university’s IRB (the researchers are currently being hounded across several websites with demands to answer the question of whether they did, in fact, submit the project for ethics review - while answering other questions, they have steadfastly ignored this one: quick suggestion that, if the researchers don’t mean to imply the answer is ‘no’, then they should probably address this question very explicitly, very soon).

I highly recommend that you read the entirety of the post, if you haven’t already. And I can only hope that I never fail this hard. Wow. (Please, somebody, if you’re reading this: warn me before I fail this hard? Thank you.) Not least because I include a chapter on cognitive narratology as it pertains to fanfiction in my thesis. (Hint: Google Lisa Zunshine.)

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Guestpost: Karen Hellekson on research ethics

Posted by admin in Meta on June 1st, 2009

Since fan studies questionnaires and surveys aren’t released every day, I thought it might be interesting to hear from professionals in the field about their experiences. With any luck, we’ll see more of these posts in the future. For the moment, I’m pleased to introduce a woman who needs no introduction: Karen Hellekson, co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures and Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. -Madeline

Fandom research methods

Karen Hellekson

ClinicalTrials.gov provides a model for Fandom Research in terms of attempting to corral study information in one handy place. Fandom Research collects various methods of polling or querying various fan communities, whereas ClinicalTrials.gov collects information about clinical trials that may be accessed by researchers and by regular people who may want to get in on that new cancer drug trial. Compared with creating a good set of valid measures in the ethnography-based fan world, setting up a clinical trial is easy, if only because its protocols are universally well understood, thanks to tried-and-true codes of best practice. Institutional review board approval? Check! Informed consent? Check! Double-blind randomization? Check! Validated questionnaire? Check! Statistical analysis with the correct test for the type of data? Check!

Of course it’s inappropriate to generalize the protocols used in medical clinical trials to fandom research, but many acafans setting up studies need to be aware of the requirements that will ensure the validity—and publishability—of their work. Before initiating a study that involves human subjects, acafans affiliated with a university may need to wend their way through their institution’s byzantine institutional review board (IRB) paperwork, where they will be faced with ridiculous requirements that have nothing to do with their discipline. IRBs generally work with proposed studies that are biomedical or behavioral, not in the field of social science, and the one-size-fits-all paperwork reflects that.

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