Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
an ethical obligation to state his or her intentions to others in the group and
respect people's wishes if they declined to participate in a “substudy.”
Confidentiality and anonymity
Submit “confidentiality and anonymity” in any online search engine and you'll
access a wide range of information on the topic. The core issues for online
researchers are the secure storage of data and the protection of participant
identities.
Anonymity and confidentiality are related online in that a researcher has
the option of enabling some level of anonymity to protect confidentiality.
Therefore, a decision has to be made as to whether or not participants will
have disguised identities in a study, and at what level - high or low - they will
be disguised. For example, in a low-disguise situation, a participant in a chat
room focus group might use their personal pseudonym or their first name. If
a higher level of disguise is sought, personal details of any kind (gender,
domain names, institutions, usernames, etc.) would not be used. Researchers
are advised to evaluate the guidelines of their discipline as well as review their
own study protocol to determine what level of anonymity is appropriate for
a given study.
It is important to keep in mind that a desired level of anonymity and a real-
ized level of anonymity may drive technology choices. A researcher may prefer
a high level of anonymity with no use of information, such as a participant's
institution, that could be tracked. While that may be the hope, using a listserv
to conduct a focus group makes that preference extremely difficult, if not unat-
tainable. Many participants may choose to use their work accounts to partici-
pate, allowing all other participants to see email addresses, such as user@bc.edu
and user@fidelity.com.
The level of anonymity may vary with how data are collected. In the case of
blogs, the norm on the internet is that webloggers retain copyright. Thus, there
is less need to protect their identity. However, this situation raises a different
challenge for the researcher that should be addressed in the informed consent.
If a researcher is planning to use content posted to a blog, s/he is obliged to
attribute authorship to the blog poster, or make explicit their intentions and
how that may differ from normative understandings.
A good strategy for maintaining the anonymity of research participants in a
study is to convert any public user identification like names, usernames, IP
addresses (e.g. 151.199.48.136), social security numbers or other governmental
identification into a unique code. When data are gathered and stored, use the
code and not other identifiers. To ensure identity protection, the code for your
identifier system should be kept on a separate computer or external disk. In
this way, if data are compromised, identities may still be protected.
