Premium
Research using blogs for data: Public documents or private musings?
Author(s) -
Eastham Linda A.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
research in nursing and health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.836
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1098-240X
pISSN - 0160-6891
DOI - 10.1002/nur.20443
Subject(s) - subject (documents) , public health , plan (archaeology) , internet privacy , public relations , data source , psychology , sociology , political science , medicine , world wide web , computer science , nursing , history , data mining , archaeology
Abstract Nursing and other health sciences researchers increasingly find blogs to be valuable sources of information for investigating illness and other human health experiences. When researchers use blogs as their exclusive data source, they must discern the public/private aspects inherent in the nature of blogs in order to plan for appropriate protection of the bloggers' identities. Approaches to the protection of human subjects are poorly addressed when the human subject is a blogger and the blog is used as an exclusive source of data. Researchers may be assisted to protect human subjects via a decisional framework for assessing a blog author's intended position on the public/private continuum. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Res Nurs Health 34:353–361, 2011