RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

64 THE ETHICS OF EDUCATIONAL AND SOCIAL RESEARCH
media, for example, privacy is seriously violated.
The more people there are who can learn about
the information, the more concern there must be
about privacy (see Diener and Crandall 1978).
As is the case with most rights, privacy can
be voluntarily relinquished. Research participants
may choose to give up their right to privacy either
by allowing a researcher access to sensitive topics
or settings or by agreeing that the research report
may identify them by name. The latter case at least
would be an occasion where informed consent
would need to be sought.
Generally speaking, if researchers intend to
probe into the private aspects or affairs of
individuals, their intentions should be made clear
and explicit and informed consent should be
sought from those who are to be observed or
scrutinized in private contexts. Other methods
to protect participants are anonymity and
confidentiality and our examination of these
follows.
Privacy is more than simple confidentiality
(discussed below). The right to privacy means
that a person has the right not to take part in
the research, not to answer questions, not to be
interviewed, not to have their home intruded into,
not to answer telephone calls or emails, and to
engage in private behaviour in their own private
place without fear of being observed. It is freedom
from as well as freedom for. Thisisfrequentlyan
issue with intrusive journalism. Hence researchers
may have an obligation to inform participants of
their rights to refuse to take part in any or all of
the research, to obtain permission to conduct the
research, to limit the time needed for participation
and to limit the observation to public behaviour.
Anonymity
Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias (1992) underline
the need for confidentiality of participants’
identities, and that any violations of this should
be made with the agreement of the participants.
The essence of anonymity is that information provided
by participants should in no way reveal
their identity. The obverse of this is, as we saw
earlier, personal data that uniquely identify their
supplier. A participant or subject is therefore considered
anonymous when the researcher or another
person cannot identify the participant or subject
from the information provided. Where this
situation holds, a participant’s privacy is guaranteed,
no matter how personal or sensitive the
information is. Thus a respondent completing a
questionnaire that bears absolutely no identifying
marks – names, addresses, occupational details
or coding symbols – is ensured complete and total
anonymity. A subject agreeing to a face-to-face interview,
on the other hand, can in no way expect
anonymity. At most, the interviewer can promise
confidentiality. Non-traceability is an important
matter, and this extends to aggregating data in
some cases, so that an individual’s response is
unknowable.
The principal means of ensuring anonymity,
then, is not using the names of the participants or
any other personal means of identification. Further
ways of achieving anonymity have been listed
by Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias (1992), for
example, the use of aliases, the use of codes for
identifying people (to keep the information on
individuals separate from access to them) and the
use of password-protected files.
These may work satisfactorily in most situations,
but as Raffe and his colleagues (1989) have
shown, there is sometimes the difficulty of
maintaining an assurance of anonymity when,
for example, combining data may uniquely
identify an individual or institution or when
there is access to incoming returns by support
staff. Plummer (1983), likewise, refers to life
studies in which names have been changed,
places shifted, and fictional events added to
prevent acquaintances of subjects discovering their
identity. Although one can go a long way down
this path, there is no absolute guarantee of total
anonymity as far as life studies are concerned.
In experimental research the experimenter is
interested in ‘human’ behaviour rather than in
the behaviour of specific individuals (Aronson and
Carlsmith 1969). Consequently the researcher has
absolutely no interest in linking the person as
aunique,namedindividualtoactualbehaviour,
and the research data can be transferred to coded,