Search results

As Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) proliferate, calls have emerged for ethical reflection. Ethics guidelines have played a central role in this respect. While quantitative research on the ethics guidelines of AI/Big Data has been undertaken, there has been a dearth of systematic qualitative analyses of these documents.

Aiming to address this research gap, this paper analyses 70 international ethics guidelines documents from academia, NGOs and the corporate realm, published between 2017 and 2020.

The article presents four key findings: existing ethics guidelines (1) promote a broad spectrum of values; (2) focus principally on AI, followed by (Big) Data and algorithms; (3) do not adequately define the term “ethics” and related terms; and (4) have most frequent recourse to the values of “transparency,” “privacy,” and “security.” Based on these findings, the article argues that the guidelines corpus exhibits discernible utilitarian tendencies; guidelines would benefit from greater reflexivity with respect to their ethical framework; and virtue ethical approaches have a valuable contribution to make to the process of guidelines development.

The paper provides qualitative insights into the ethical discourse surrounding AI guidelines, as well as a concise overview of different types of operative translations of theoretical ethical concepts vis-à-vis the sphere of AI. These may prove beneficial for (applied) ethicists, developers and regulators who understand these guidelines as policy.

The COVID-19 global health pandemic brought much of qualitative research to a halt causing researchers to pivot from initial research plans and reimagine the possibilities of their scholarship. Accordingly, we sought to understand how the abrupt pivot to virtual methodologies could influence qualitative research in this context and future contexts.

To explore how two concurrent studies were impacted, we conducted a Collaborative Retrospective Analysis (CRA). We share results from a secondary analysis of two individual studies conducted concurrently by the authors.

The paper puts forth lessons learned concerning redesigning qualitative studies, engagement with vulnerable populations and application for ethical considerations.

We advance qualitative research methods by conducting a CRA of two concurrent, but separate studies. We put forth implications for designing qualitative studies in a re-envisioned and increasingly hybrid world and we share collaborative practices gleaned throughout the research process.