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Apomediation and ancillary care
O’Connor, Dan
O’Connor, Dan
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n7_OConnor.pdf
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This paper examines the responsibilities of researchers to provide ancillary care – care beyond that necessary to assure subject safety and scientific validity – to the subjects of their investigations into health-related online communities. The paper argues that many health-related online communities are online environments in which information is apomediated – that is, mediated in a social fashion by peers – rather than intermediated by authorities and experts for the benefit of lay persons. Researchers who investigate such online communities arguably have an ancillary care responsibility to those communities; namely, to become apomediaries themselves in order to help mitigate the dissemination and acceptance of incorrect or even dangerous medical (mis)information within those communities. This paper explores these arguments and proposes a simple, threestep sequence of questions to aid decision-making for researchers in these situations.
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2010-12
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With permission of the license/copyright holder