An Interesting Tweet

This past weekend, I received a tweet (on Twitter) to participate in a study that is similar to mine.  The researcher is also a PhD candidate, but she is from a university that I just learned about from a job position announcement last week.  Although the job announcement is mostly irrelevant, I am very interested in this candidate's study.  I am not too worried about our study being too similar because our participant populations have a very low chance of overlapping.

I agreed to take participate in her survey and found that we asked roughly the same demographic questions, but the other research questions differed a little.  Although I am using survey software, my research is more like an interview.  However, at the end of taking her survey, I was asked if I would like to participate in an online interview via Skype.  I agreed and was a bit jealous that her IRB allows her to use an easier method of data collection, although there is a greater risk of losing confidentiality through Skype.

Our studies are also similar in that I assume that we would both qualify as participants in our own studies, meaning I could in mine and she in hers.  However, I am not sure if she would qualify for mine.  We are also similar, I believe, in that I assume that she has worked in the same English Language Fellowship I have.

I wonder about the ethical and other implications of interviewing a participant like me who may know the research theories and frameworks quite well.  How would this benefit or contaminate her data collection?  It is her choice to make as I felt it was my ethical duty to let her know I was conducting research on a similar inquiry.  Perhaps this is someone I can collaborate with once our dissertations are defended and our PhDs earned.  It would be interesting to compare and contrast our studies once completed.

Email Interviews

I have learned an interesting detail about conducting asynchronous online interviews.  Last year, I read through the literature on online interviews to learn that the most common method of asynchronous online interviews was via email.  Many studies have used this approach to collect all or some of their interview data.  However, the Internal Review Board at the University of Iowa acknowledges that email is not a secure method of data collection.  Therefore I run the risk of losing confidentiality through this process.  The literature also mentions this risk; nonetheless, the researchers were able to conduct email interviews.  However, the IRB does not advise this method, and I am not too surprised.  Although I agree that email is not the most secure method of collecting interview data, the risk is not much lower with other methods.  And the University of Iowa's IRB is known to be more cautious than most others.  The main issue here is not contacting participants or sending them questions via email; it is the receipt of written responses.  It is my responsibility to provide my participants with a secure method of answering my interview questions.

My alternative plan is to use a web survey software program supported by the University of Iowa.  This program is widely used by researchers, so I assume that IRB will find this a safer alternative to email.  Although this plan will consume a little bit more of my time, I will be building research skills associated with the utility of web survey software programs.  Perhaps it will end up saving me time at the end of the data collection process.  The lesson I learned is that even though most of the literature reports mostly positive results of a certain data collection method, it may no longer or may not be the safest or best possible way.