Poster Session Ethical Considerations in Conducting Online Interviews for CALL Research more

As online interviews become increasingly common in CALL research, particularly in studies involving virtual exchanges, online language learning environments, and technology-mediated communication, new ethical challenges are emerging that demand careful attention. While online interviews offer greater accessibility and flexibility, they also raise important concerns around data security, participant privacy, informed consent, and shifting power dynamics in virtual spaces (Deakin & Wakefield, 2014; Guo et al., 2024). This poster explores how digital affordances shape researcher-participant interactions and introduce new ethical considerations specific to CALL contexts. Challenges are addressed, including navigating consent in online platforms, ensuring participant anonymity in multimodal environments, and managing the evolving power dynamics when participants can control their visibility or disengage at any time. These issues are especially pertinent in CALL studies where participants may be learners or teachers working across different cultural and institutional contexts. The poster will offer CALL researchers practical strategies to address these ethical concerns. For example, designing more transparent digital consent procedures, selecting secure communication platforms, and adopting reflexive practices to account for asymmetries in digital communication. The session will foster interactive discussions on how CALL researchers can ethically design and conduct online interviews responding to the complexities of digital research ecologies.