Assumptions, emotions, and interpretations as ethical moments: navigating a small-scale cross-cultural online interviewing study

In this paper, I map important ‘messy’ elements that I learned from my five-month small-scale research project, one that was designed around pivotal works on online social research. I used computers and the Internet with Miñan, a young man living in Guinea, West Africa, in order to examine his perceptions surrounding the value of these technological tools for his future. Throughout the paper, I address multiple levels of ethics in practice such as recognizing the different effects that the Internet environment can have on participants, the realities that cross-cultural barriers pose the researcher and the participant, the impact of previous relationships on the research process, and how meanings produced by language are easily misinterpreted via the Internet. As a result, I assert that during online social research, reflexivity is a moral obligation, where meaning and representation can have a tendency to be skewed, especially when working in cross-cultural situations.