ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an awareness of ethical issues among applied linguists and stimulates some critical discussion, by recounting some of the ethical challenges in conducting Internet-based research. It discusses whether researchers can apply ethical principles followed in traditional offline research directly to text-based online applied linguistics research and how researchers deploy textual data collected from the Internet. The text-based Internet research is not immune to ethical problems even though the Internet circumvents any physical contact. In fact, the blurring of private and public domains and fluidity of online membership with ensuing ethical quandaries demands the exercise of an enhanced scholarly responsibility throughout the research process. To meet such rigorous demands, we need to anticipate potential ethical problems before undertaking any research action, protect online participants proactively and have solutions in stock should issues arise during data collection, and report and respond to each unique situation when conducting Internet-based research in applied linguistics.
