Screening Criteria
We recruited five participants based in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the UK. We also included one second-hand anonymous interview from the Netherlands because the individual talked about their deliberate move to anonymise their advocacy online.
- Self-identification questions (if they identify as politically active)
- Frequency of online posts
- Frequency of online bans and harassment
Ultimately, the key consideration was the willingness to talk about their own harrowing experiences moving countries following intense online harassment in Bangladesh.
From Consent From to Internal Data Privacy Guidelines
We initially wrote a consent form to assure our participants of their privacy and security. This exercise was valuable for openly discussing our team’s research operations - internal data collection, access restrictions, and deletion guidelines.
- Why we are doing the study
- How data will be stored (local hard drives of the researchers)
- How data will be presented, for whom, and in what format (PowerPoint slides, report format, and published online for education purposes)
- Access restrictions (only the researchers and not the whole organisation or even the commissioning personnel will have access to raw data)
- Sharing the summary of the results (in PDF)
- Clear compensation details (none, in this case)
- Choice to fully delete all personal details or withhold participation within thirty days and deleted all raw information entirely from the project database.
We found that the consent form scared interviewees and we dropped it after the first interview and used these as part of our internal research guidelines.
