YOUNG

Research into youth engagement with social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook highlights a complex set of ethical dimensions, which do not always translate easily from similar concerns in traditional offline research. On social network sites, it is clear that many young people are managing their online presences in strategic ways, often involving conventions around determining access to these spaces. If these sites are framed by their young users as at least ‘partially private’, how should the researcher seek access to these spaces and how should the researcher operate in these spaces if access is permitted? This article reflects on qualitative research undertaken by the author from 2007 to 2010, which involved ‘friending’ participants on MySpace and Facebook. Based on this reflection, and contextualized by an engagement with literature concerning both Internet research and youth research, this article argues that social network sites blur the public/private dichotomy. Thus, research engaging with participants on these sites requires ongoing ethical reflection around assumptions about public and private information, and researchers, institutional ethics committees and review boards must develop and make use of suitably informed expertise to both conduct and review future scholarship in this area.

Recent developments in mobile and information technology provide new ways of conducting research with young people. The ubiquitous use of mobile telephones by young people, for example, allows researchers to interact with participants who are neither physically present nor spatially fixed, so that data can be captured as young people go about their daily lives. Using mobile phones to interview young people, however, presents a number of ethical challenges which may not be addressed by standard ethical frameworks. Drawing on a study of 42 university students aged 20–25 years old in Wales (the United Kingdom [UK]), this article examines the practical and ethical issues associated with conducting in-depth interviews via mobile telephones, and highlights the challenge of maintaining participant confidentiality when young people choose to conduct their mobile telephone conversations in public places. This article contends that research guidelines need to be more responsive to young people’s use of technology and their shifting interpretations of public/private boundaries to encourage good research practice that safeguards young people’s personal data.

This article has two aims: (i) to examine a series of ethical challenges that arose during the course of a visual ethnography which sought to understand the ways in which young people use popular visual material culture in their everyday lives; and (ii) to look critically at ‘reciprocity’ and ‘self-reflexivity’ as two commonly cited strategies for supporting ethical ethnographic youth research. Using a self-reflexive style throughout, the author draws on Amit (2000) to underline a tension embedded in an assumed separation between the ‘field’ and ‘real’ life—or between the professional and the personal. It is argued that visual ethnography was the handmaiden to several ethical dilemmas that, though powerful, self-reflexivity and reciprocity failed to ameliorate. Furthermore, it is also argued that an enhancement of these strategies is essential for future ethical visual ethnographic youth research. Two possible ways forward, including arts-based research and ‘pedagogic visual ethnography’, are offered.

This article grapples with the ethical dilemmas of youth research, and more specifically ‘edgework’, via an experiential account of fieldwork with ‘boy racers’ in Aberdeen, Scotland. ‘Edgework’ is ethically problematic for those who wish to conduct fieldwork with youths. By engaging in ‘edgework’, researchers can find themselves unwittingly drawn into the deviant activities of youths, as deviance slowly becomes the norm through prolonged immersion in their social world. ‘Edgework’ also blurs the line between insider and outsider status, threatening the researcher’s ability to step back from the field and critically reflect on their experiences. Furthermore, the experiential aspect of the ‘edgework’ method is called to the fore since the researcher’s experiences of risky behaviours (in terms of discomfort) differed from those of the researched (in terms of pleasure).

Since 2000, we have been undertaking a restudy of Elias’s ‘Adjustment of Young Workers to Work Situations and Adult Roles’ project (1962–64). We experienced a number of ethical dilemmas/questions in undertaking the restudy and in this article, we outline these and discuss how we resolved them as the project developed. In doing so, we focus our discussion around three central questions: (i) how did we reuse this data and balance the conflict between having access to personal biographical information with the wish to trace and reinterview the original respondents?; (ii) how do we responsibly analyze data that was collected but never used whilst providing an authentic voice for these ‘past’ young workers?; and (iii) how do we accurately represent the demise of the research project and the contribution of the researchers originally involved? We conclude by considering the ethical imperative of the greater reuse of existing data on young people.