Hi
@Brooksy90280 and everyone. Thanks for tagging me in the thread and sorry I didn't get in here a bit quicker.
@Brooksy90280 Your project sounds really interesting. It looks like you are not doing an academic research project - it sounds like a investigative journalism project into a topic of interest to us at Bluelight. Women and substance use, etc.
But I think by the original framing as a 'survey' it has triggered everyone in the community to bring you into the research realm. And fair enough - part of the benefit of us supporting academic research is that we can ask for university ethics approvals and this gives us some protection. People are associated with their universities and if they are students, with their supervisors, so there is some recourse if things go wrong (or if they do the wrong thing).
But
@neversickanymore and I have been discussing having some additional procedures specifically for people who are doing projects or journalism that fall outside the academic arena. Because you aren't the first to do this, and Bluelight doesn't really have a clear pathway for these situations!
While we don't have it all worked out right this moment, if
@Cream Gravy? and
@deficiT are happy for this call-out to remain in Drug Culture, I think that's ok.
In the meantime perhaps we moderators/admins can get together and work out how to manage such requests in future. As we need to balance the safety of our members with desire to contribute as well as the enthusiasm and good work that many journalists and activists are doing, outside of the academic world.
To everyone thinking of participating, I'm sure you can apply your own skepticism and the same levels of caution you apply when considering what to write on Bluelight.
To
@Brooksy90280 - things to consider would be provide me/us with follow-up information, e.g an email address that will be around later, and to come back to Bluelight (to this thread ideally!) with a link to the website when it is complete, so we can look at the output we have contributed to. If you are able to, perhaps also adding an acknowledgement to Bluelight.org (with a link) on your website would be excellent. It will be imperative that you don't link people's responses to your interview questions with any identifying information including site username, but I think you have already got this covered.
Also - anyone reading this may be interesed in the book my friend Jenny Valentish wrote -
Woman of Substances - on this topic!
