Online Interviews as New Methodological Normalcy and a Space of Ethics: An Autoethnographic Investigation into Covid-19 Educational Research

Abstract

Worldwide travel restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic abruptly changed the norms of conducting qualitative research. Online interviews, long regarded as a second choice to their offline counterparts, are no longer seen as supplementary since they emerged as the dominant mode of data collection during the pandemic. This study employs an autoethnographic approach to investigate the authors’ experiences of adjusting to alternative methodological approaches. The investigation critically reflects on how the author’s agencies in allocating and gathering instructional, social, and economic resources led to a researcher identity reconfigured by choices in making ethical commitment in data collection. This article also sheds light on how the authors, constrained by limited resources, gained better understanding of ethics in practice through negotiation with participants and obtained rich data by exercising their agencies. The article argues that researchers need to place both online and offline methods on equal footing to facilitate a more ethically sensitive approach to data collection.