Teorema de las Rebanadas de Fourier Discreto

The documentation of ethical decisions not only creates transparency but serves, given the lack of explicit legal guidelines and information regarding procedures followed in previous studies of texting, as a much-needed framework for future research into texted data. Corpus compilation involves consideration of legal and ethical implications of collecting and processing data comparable to researchers obtaining spoken (rather than published, written) data: participant consent, anonymising data, and ensuring participants‘ bibliographic information is safely stored. That is, the main ethical considerations in the current study are to protect the rights and interests of those who wrote messages used and those named in them. In ensuring that participants‘ interests are protected, procedures adopted in other studies can be drawn upon, as well as existing legal and ethical guidelines. In the UK, ethical guidelines established by disciplines such as BAAL,3 institutions such as the University of Birmingham4 or AoIR, the Association of Internet Researchers (Ess 2002), need to ensure researchers work within principles outlined in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (AHDS 2003)5 and the Data Protection Act 19986 (Rock 2001: 8).7Working within ethical guidelines is, however, far from straightforward: the legal

1

See section 4.2.1 where the above points are also made. 2

In fact, as explored below, message selection forms a central part of the ethical procedure by which data was collected, in that it allowed participants to control which data should or should not be used in the analysis.

3 _{See BAAL‘s ‗Recommendations for Good Practice‘ for applied linguistic research:}

http://www.baal.org.uk/goodprac.htm, accessed 20th October 2007. 4

See University of Birmingham‘s Code of Conduct, http://www.ppd.bham.ac.uk/policy/cop/code8.htm,

accessed 20th October 2007.

5 _{See http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/UKpga_19880048_en_1.htm}

6 _{See Office of Public Sector Information, http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/19980029.htm.} 7

Rock (2001: 8) provides an overview of legal frameworks, particularly as they relate to the anonymisation of data.

documents are somewhat complex and ambiguous,1 whilst ethical frameworks themselves (necessarily) tend to state general principles allowing flexibility rather than concrete procedures or requirements (Ess 2002; BAAL 2006: 2). 2 Uncertainty increases with postgraduate research: although since September 2007 researchers at the University of Birmingham have been required to submit self-assessment forms for staff-led research projects3 for ethical review by University Ethical Review Committees, postgraduate research cannot yet be reviewed,4 and responsibility lies primarily with supervisors. Ultimate responsibility for making ethical decisions rests, however, as evident in legal and ethical frameworks, with specific consideration of the data and project in question. This means that even in research fields or institutions with established codes of practice, decisions and procedures regarding ethical issues are shaped by the nature of particular studies and by issues such as research purpose, the vulnerability of certain participants with respect to age, social status and powerlessness, and perceived degree of ‗risk‘ to participants (Milligan 1999: 13; Ess 2002: 2).

Ethical guidelines for handling texted data cannot, unsurprisingly, be found. For example, ethical guidelines drafted by AoIR for electronic domains focus on regulating research into

public online forums (Mann and Stewart 2000; Ess 2002) including Bulletin-Boards (Collot

and Belmore 1996) and city-council emails (Hard af Segersteg 2002). Texting, in contrast, is highly private5 and we could assume expectations among users that communication will not pass into public domains and therefore greater obligations on the part of the researcher.6 However, message receivers are thus trusted to retain the privacy of messages, or at least to choose when messages can be distributed: Kasesniemi and Rautianen, for example, find teenagers often read (and compose) messages together. Close relationships noted between

1 _{Rock (2001: 8) comments on how attempts to interpret legal guidelines can result in confusion: ‗This EU} legislation [the EU Parliament Directive 1995] has been enforced in Italy, resulting in such a degree of confusion that a group of academics are contacting legal authorities about the status of linguistic data‘. 2 _{Stringent legal constraints are imposed only in certain research areas, such as those involving patient data} (e.g. Lee 2006), whilst projects covered by the NRES or the Animals Scientific Procedures Act have long been subject to institutional review

3

Available: http://www.research.bham.ac.uk/ethics.shtml

4 _{See: http://www.rcs.bham.ac.uk/documents/Clarification_note.doc)}

5 _{Although, in the case of text messages obtained from public online texting services, the public nature of the} site reduces users‘ expectations of privacy. Messages collected by How and Kan (2005: 4) from the Yahoo SMS website were publicly accessible, and obtained neither with the consent nor identification of senders who thus remained anonymous. This is also the case with the messages obtained for the current study from the AOL website.

6 _{Mobile phones are ‗emblems of intimacy‘ used to promote trust and solidarity in teenage groups (Harkin} 2002: 20-1) and by lovers who, according to Kasesniemi and Rautianinen (2002), send text messages as a sign of confidence in their relationship.

texters suggests receivers can gauge the level of privacy or sensitivity of each message. Researchers‘ responsibilities are also reduced by the relatively trivial content of messages often used for co-ordinating activities (as described in Ling and Yttri 2002) and the focus not on content but linguistic form (Ess 2002: 7-8). In fact, many of my participants expressed interest in the research (as in Kasesniemi and Rautianen 2002), suggesting benefits for those involved (Ess 2002). The reduced ‗risk‘ to participants in studies of text messaging is perhaps reflected by the fact that researchers tend not to be very explicit in their treatment of ethical issues: Fairon and Paumier (2006: 3), for example, simply note that at the stage of translating their messages into standardised French, they were ‗already anonymised‘.

The following overview of ethical considerations for the current doctoral study of text messaging, chiefly consent and anonymisation, therefore serves not only to support the current study but proposes a possible framework for adaptation to future studies of text messaging; bearing in mind that ultimate responsibility for making ethical decisions will rest, as evident in legal and ethical frameworks, with specific consideration of the project in question.