Methods and Ethics for Research about Women’s Vlogs that Disclose Experiences of Sexual Violence

Introduction Vlogs have proliferated online, particularly since the 2005 launch of YouTube, providing space for new forms of self-representation. Vlogging platforms have disrupted narratives perpetuated by traditional media by allowing marginalised and stigmatised people to broadcast their own stories (Kennedy and Sardarabady). Thus, in the social media age people not only briefly share experiences of sexual victimisation through hashtags such as #MeToo but also vlog about them. Such vlogs upend traditional representations of sexual violence victims as preferring to keep their experience to themselves as a shameful secret. In 2022 I led a study on nineteen YouTube videos tagged #MeToo posted by female vloggers that told of a firsthand experience of sexual violence (Harrington and Gerrard). This article begins by considering the advantages and limits of such vlogs for sexual violence research. I argue that analysis of vlogs may be preferable to the risk of retraumatising survivors by eliciting their stories through qualitative interviews. However, researchers need to consider how the nature of vlogging platforms shapes the sorts of stories that can be told in this context. I then focus on ethical debates over vlog research. Researchers disagree over whether we should treat vloggers as human subjects of research or as authors. If we treat vloggers as human subjects, then we should seek informed consent to use their stories as data and/or anonymise their identities in publications. However, I argue that vlogs should be acknowledged as a form of life writing. Vloggers use digital media creatively and purposefully to tell their stories and connect with their followers. Therefore, researchers have an ethical responsibility to cite vlogs as creative productions whose authors should be acknowledged. Nevertheless, I acknowledge grey areas where anonymisation may be appropriate, such as when children vlog about personal stories and when vloggers delete posts after the researcher has included them in their analysis but before publication. Vlogs about First-Hand Experiences of Sexual Violence as a Source of Data Vlogs can provide an important source of qualitative data about sexual violence that offer some advantages over the more traditional method of conducting in-depth interviews. Interviews have important advantages. Researchers can easily gather accurate demographic information from interviews. They can guide the topics covered by the interview to suit their research agenda. Interviews also allow the researcher to ask follow-up questions as needed. Interviewees’ responses to such questions may lead them to articulate their experiences in ways they had not previously. However, recruitment of participants for research on first-hand experiences of sexual violence involves serious ethical challenges. Researchers often contact survivors through support service providers, but people seeking such support may not be in a space to give informed consent to participate in research (Campbell et al. 4771). Interviewers need to prepare for and manage survivors’ emotional distress and avoid retraumatising them (Draucker et al. ). While some survivors want to tell their story and have a positive experience of research participation, others may not (Draucker). Thus, interviews present a risk of serious harm that must be carefully managed. Researcher control over the interview also presents problems. Researchers have grappled with how the context of research affects what people say and how they behave, with many advocating for “unobtrusive methods” that avoid researcher impact on the data (Lee). The power dynamic between the interviewer and interviewee has long been recognised as a problem with research interviews (Oakley). In the case of stigmatised experiences such as sexual violence, this power dynamic is likely to influence how the interviewee responds to questions. The questions themselves may constrain how the interviewee is able to tell their story. Unobtrusive methods usually involve found data such as artifacts, observations, and “documents of life”, for example diaries and letters (Plummer). As such documents of life, vlogs that include first-hand accounts of sexual violence provide a good source of data since the vlogger has already decided to tell their story. They have had the opportunity to write their script, to think over details they want to disclose, and to decide on themes they want to focus on. Vloggers can further reflect on whether they want to revise their words or self-presentation as they edit their video. They can manage and reveal any distress in their own way. However, researchers need to contextualise their analysis of vlogs about sexual violence by understanding the imperatives and constraints of vlogging. Social context affects what people can say and how they behave both offline and online. Therefore, we should not assume that people will tell more authentic stories about their experiences of sexual violence in research interviews than in their vlog, or vice versa. Rather, we should consider how the vlogging platform’s vernacular, including its “conventions, affordances and restrictions, ” shapes content (Mendes et al. 1291). Importantly, YouTube vloggers can monetise their channels by promoting products and services to their followers. Even those not focussed on monetisation still seek to maximise their views, likes, and subscriptions. Thus, building a large, regular following is important to many vloggers. Vloggers often participate in the genre of published diary “associated with intimate disclosure and private life” and promising “rawness and unselfconsciousness” (Cardell 5) by offering audiences a glimpse into their private space, thoughts, and feelings. The opportunity to monetise content and the imperative to amass followers drives such personal self-disclosure. Successful vloggers cultivate a sense of community with their followers by speaking as a relatable, authentic person facing the same everyday struggles as them. Brooke Duffy and Emily Hund found that the fashion bloggers they studied deployed “carefully curated personal sharing” as a way of building a sense of intimacy with their followers (7). Other analyses of vlogs and blogs similarly comment on their confessional nature as connecting the vlogger and audience (Dekavalla; Berryman and Kavka; Kennedy “Arriving”). Kennedy reports that followers of her vlog responded more to self-revealing videos where she discussed personal struggles, but that making such videos made her feel vulnerable (“Arriving” 570). Berryman and Kavka found that commenters praised vloggers who filmed themselves crying over personal problems for their authenticity. They argue this perceived authenticity strengthens the bond between vlogger and audience. The possibility of using hashtags allows YouTubers to connect their personal/authentic stories with broader conversations happening across social media platforms, as in the case of #MeToo. The emergence of #MeToo on Twitter created an affective sense of shared experience by linking sexual violence survivors’ experiences. The hashtag enables survivors to tell new kinds of stories and makes such sharing appropriate. While tweets only allow people to share snippets of experience, YouTube allows users to narrate their experiences at length. YouTube’s affordances and norms thus foster a genre of vlogging that involves narration of personal experiences of sexual violence in a way that connects personal experience to a wider social problem. Analysis of such narratives provides a window into, for example, the sorts of experiences women interpret as sexual violence, how it affected them, and how they explain it. That perceived authenticity is important to vloggers’ success suggests #MeToo vlogs are crafted for particular audiences and shaped by the norms and conventions of the platform and movement. The resulting vlogs represent the sorts of sexual victimisation stories that appear authentic post-#MeToo, and they demonstrate what survivors can and cannot say about such experiences in public. Where, how, and with/for whom these stories are shared presents ethical challenges for researchers interested in #MeToo vlogs, which I discuss in the following section. The Case for Anonymisation and/or Informed Consent Vloggers’ often have niche audiences that form a kind of intimate public (Berlant). Berlant provides a critical account of women’s culture in the United States as “distinguished by a view that the people marked by femininity already have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate, revelatory, and a relief” (Berlant ix). Her analysis applies well to the world of women’s vlogging concerned with feminine everyday lives, fashion, cosmetics, and relationships. For Berlant, although such a public may feel intimate, it is an artifact of marketing and media strategies. However, some social media researchers have adopted the concept to describe how people may imagine their publicly available online posts as communicating to a limited public that shares a similar emotional world to themselves (Ravn et al. ). Consequently, vloggers may not anticipate that their vlog will receive much attention from a wider public, let alone from researchers. Therefore, Ravn et al. recommend that social media researchers ask themselves who the intended public for a given online post is, rather than seeing it as uncomplicatedly publicly available. They further point out that social media users may not have checked their privacy settings recently, so the publicness of their post could be accidental. Based on such logic, some argue that researchers should seek informed consent from vloggers before using their posts as data, though I found that this practice is rare. In my review of 39 articles, published between 2017 and 2023, that analysed YouTube vlogs, only five mentioned seeking informed consent. Four of these did not explain their ethical reasoning for gaining informed consent (Frobenius; Harley and Fitzpatrick; Horak; Schuman et al. ). One (Shaw) later explained that they had done so because their institutional ethics committee demanded it, which is something I have also experienced (Harrington, “Making”). Gaining such informed consent presents practical difficulties. As both Shaw and I found, many vloggers simply do not answer emails informing them about the research and seeking consent to include their vlog in it. This is hardly surprising in cases when vloggers have thousands of followers and presumably receive a lot of email at their publicly posted address. Even those with smaller followings may receive a lot of email, including spam, at their public address, which they may not check that often. Some vloggers post that their email address is for business correspondence only, thus making it ethically questionable to send unsolicited non-business mail to that address (Jowett). In the case of my research on #MeToo vlogs, being compelled to seek informed consent posed an additional ethical qualm. I chose to select vlogs that had been posted for several months to provide some reassurance that the vlogger had time to regret posting it and take it down. I felt uncomfortable emailing them out of the blue and reminding them of their sexual assault experience, thus bringing it to the forefront of their mind and possibly upsetting them. Just because a vlogger feels comfortable having their sensitive stories publicly available on YouTube does not mean that they cannot be disturbed by unexpected reminders of one of the worst experiences of their life. Given the difficulties of seeking informed consent, many vlog researchers opt to anonymise vlog data as an ethical alternative. I previously chose to anonymise vlog data when researching “my rape story” videos. I reasoned that, although they had publicly posted their story, the vloggers may find it jarring to see discussion of their story in an academic paper (Harrington, “Neoliberal”). Other researchers of vlogs that tell a personal sexual violence story have done the same (Nelon et al. ; Almanssori and Stanley; Garcia and Vemuri). The searchability of the Internet makes anonymisation a serious challenge. Some social media researchers argue that proper anonymisation means that researchers should not use direct quotations because entering the quote into a search engine could easily lead readers to the original source (Andalibi et al. 3915; Reagle). It may be possible for search engines to locate quotations within vlogs if they include captions or transcripts. Thus, some researchers recommend using composite stories to properly anonymise social media data (Shaw; Markham). Shaw describes how she and her co-author chose this approach after most vloggers in their sample did not respond to their requests for informed consent. While retaining key details from each vlogger, they created fictional profiles. They also avoided using direct quotations, synthesising similar quotes in the hope of capturing the emotional truth of what was said (Shaw 30). Anonymisation as an alternative to informed consent depends upon treatment of vlogs as both public and private. On the one hand, researchers argue that informed consent is not necessary since the text is public. On the other, they worry that whoever posted the text may not have realised it could be collected as research data or want that to happen. Therefore, they attempt to make the link between their research and the data impossible to trace. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult for other scholars to check their interpretations of the data against the original text and its context. The Case for Citation Creative work goes into producing a YouTube vlog; it takes effort to make a vlog appear off-the-cuff and like an intimate chat with a good friend. However, researchers should not assume that self-revealing vlogs are the same as other forms of social media where people post about their everyday lives, such as Facebook conversations or Reddit threads. Even when they have a DIY aesthetic, with the vlogger sitting on their bed in their pyjamas, for example, the setting, clothing, and script may represent hours of thought about how best to present the video’s content. Thus, as Kennedy points out, discussing such vlogs without citing the vlogger denies them proper acknowledgement of their published intellectual property (“Becoming” 81). Many states, including Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States grant vloggers the same rights as other authors under copyright law (Hookway and Snee 164). If we think about vlogs as published creative work, then researchers who have analysed such work have an ethical and legal obligation to cite their sources rather than disguise them, just as they would if they had analysed other media such as TV shows, films, or music. YouTube provides a platform for people to publish stories from perspectives that may not make it into traditional media. If researchers treat such alternative media differently from mainstream media, then we contribute to “the unequal power relations of media production by blocking full representation of alternative media” (Bassett and O’Riordan 244). Furthermore, many vloggers have audiences of millions. Like other media, the content of such vlogs is worthy of critical analysis. Researchers could distinguish between high-profile vloggers with large followings and vloggers who present as everyday people. Legewie and Nassauer suggest that videos with many views posted to well-known platforms like YouTube present fewer ethical risks than those posted in less high-profile venues. However, if vloggers seek maximum visibility for their content, for example by exhorting viewers to “like, comment, subscribe”, then there seems no reason not to cite them even if their viewer numbers are not high. If researchers confine themselves to analysis of popular vlogs, then they will likely neglect minority voices. By veiling the identity of people who vlog about sensitive or controversial issues, researchers may inadvertently collude with social forces that seek to shame and silence such stories. For example, Bassett and O’Riordan discuss their objections to editorial pressure to anonymise their research on a lesbian Website. They argue that such anonymisation would perpetuate the belief that lesbians should be ashamed of their identity. Likewise, anonymising research on #MeToo videos could perpetuate rape myths that shame victims of sexual violence. When vloggers post #MeToo they join a discourse that pushes back against the shaming and silencing of victims. In many #MeToo vlogs the vlogger explicitly speaks of not remaining silent and ashamed. For a researcher to anonymise the identity of such vloggers goes against their expressed intention to “go public”. Kennedy made a similar point in her study of “mummy vloggers” (“Becoming” 82). However, researchers also need to recognise that vlogs differ from traditional publications in their degree of permanence and connection to online community-building. People who vlog about personal stories often delete videos in the ongoing process of crafting their online identity and connection with their community of followers. When researchers cite vlog posts out of their original context to support an academic analysis they deny the vlogger control over their own story. This ethical dilemma is particularly difficult when the vlogger has deleted a post that a researcher has used to build an academic argument. Researchers who use YouTube vlogs as data need to weigh up the vloggers’ “right to control their online narrative and identity now and in the future” (Kennedy and Sardarabady 6) against their ethical obligations to acknowledge vloggers’ creative work. When confronted with this dilemma in previous research I decided not to include posts taken down before I submitted my research for publication (Harrington, “Neoliberal”). Arguably, however, removed posts that had previously contributed to a researcher’s analysis cannot realistically be removed from a study since they have shaped the research findings. Researchers may not be aware of a post’s removal before they publish their analysis. As in my case, researchers may become aware of the removal when attempting to double check something from the post, but whether or not that happens is random. Patterson argues that given the arbitrary nature of the timing and researcher awareness of deletions, it is unrealistic to expect researchers not to include deleted posts in their analysis (764). Nevertheless, researchers may risk harming a vlogger by referencing a post the vlogger no longer wants public. They can mitigate such risk by only analysing posts that have been publicly posted for several months. Vloggers cannot expect to eliminate the impact of a post that has been online for months or years, since researchers and non-researchers alike may be influenced by it and continue to discuss it. However, researchers who do learn of a post’s removal before they publish could consider only using data from it to support their analysis without directly quoting or citing the post. Children’s vlogs present more complex ethical questions. During research on “my rape story” and #MeToo videos I found vlog posts by children that describe their sexual violence experiences and, in one case, their experience of disclosing to adults and the subsequent judicial process. These videos were recent posts that disappeared quickly. At the time, I decided only to analyse vlogs by adults. However, I watched the children’s videos and still reflect on them. They provide insight into how children process such experiences. Such videos could be ethically analysed for research purposes. However, they would need to be thoroughly anonymised rather than cited since children may not understand the implications of publicly vlogging about their experiences. Conclusion Vlogs may provide researchers with important insights into first-hand experiences of sexual violence while avoiding the ethical challenges of questioning survivors in research interviews. However, researchers must attend to the vlogging context when analysing vlog data, just as they would pay attention to the interview context if they had interviewed survivors. This context includes an imperative for vloggers to connect with their followers by sharing their most private thoughts and experiences. Though these vlogs are personal and intimate they contribute to a public social narrative about sexual violence through the use of hashtags. Hashtags such as #MeToo and #BeenRapedNeverReported also shape the stories vloggers tell and influence the scope and reach of each vlog. No consensus currently exists on whether vloggers should be treated as human subjects or as authors for research purposes. Those who would treat vloggers as human subjects argue that many vlogs cultivate an intimate public, so that the vlogger may not anticipate their posts will gain attention from researchers or the general public. 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