“You're Not Doing Work, You're on Facebook!”: Ethics of Encountering the Field Through Social Media

Abstract

This article argues that in a time when respondents and researchers can increasingly be connected through platforms of social media, our access to and encounters with the field through social media require additional attention beyond our traditional deliberations with fieldwork. The complex nature (and the uncertainty) in social media portals and the fact that one-to-one conversations are often posted in spaces highly visible and open to be commented on by third parties radically changes our notions of relationships between researcher and respondent, what are public or private spaces, and who is considered vulnerable or not. This article therefore provides a timely and critical discussion of the diverse ways in which one can integrate social media in research and, in doing so, encourage a much-needed debate on how to better understand the dynamics and ethics behind including online domains as one site among translocal, multisite research urged by other scholars.