| Abstract | The article focuses on the ethical challenges in developing and evaluating a mobile support application to assist low literacy adults. The literacy program is for adults who completed only a few years of formal schooling and can carry out some non-complex reading and writing tasks, such as some newspaper reading and writing a very simple letter. A routine ethical expectation is that participant privacy and confidentiality are guaranteed, particularly for research involving vulnerable user groups. However, it was difficult to conduct our study while fully ensuring confidentiality. In the classroom, participants openly discussed the study details and their use of the application both when researchers were present and at other times. Ethical guidelines exist for consent forms for studies involving group interactions in which participants are explicitly informed about decreased privacy, but our protocol was not designed for this situation. |
|---|
