The Research Ethics Guidelines for Privacy Anonymity and Confidentiality in Academic Studies 2025 Guide. Managing privacy, deception, and trust in academic studies poses a significant ethical challenge, as researchers must balance the need for scientific knowledge with the rights and well-being of participants.
What are Research Ethics Guidelines for Privacy Anonymity and Confidentiality in Academic Studies 2025 Guide
Key ethical principles include minimizing harm, preserving dignity, and maintaining informed consent. This can be complicated using deception to investigate phenomena that could not otherwise be observed. A mandatory debriefing process is critical to uncovering the true purpose of a study, explaining the need for any deception, and restoring participants’ trust in the scientific process.
Fundamental Dilemma Every Researcher Faces
This includes changes to the research design, prescreening to identify and eliminate high-risk participants, and providing participants with as much information as possible during informed consent and debriefing.
Researchers have typically studied deceptive behavior in cross-cultural settings by focusing on the speaker’s nonverbal cues. This approach involves examining various aspects of nonverbal communication, such as facial expressions, body language, gestures, and general demeanor.
The Core Conflict: Knowledge vs. Human Rights
This has been explained by Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias as a conflict between two rights which they express as: the right to research and acquire knowledge and the right of individual research participants to determine self-determination, privacy and dignity. A decision not to conduct a planned research project because it interferes with the participants’ welfare is a limit on the first of these rights. A decision to conduct research despite an ethically questionable practice …is a limit on the second right. (Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias, 1992)
This constitutes the fundamental ethical dilemma of the social scientist for which there are no absolute rights or wrong answers. Which proposition is favored, or how a balance between the two is struck will depend very much on the background, experience, and personal values of the individual researcher. With this issue in mind, we now examine other dilemmas that may con front investigators once they have come to some accommodation with this fundamental dilemma and decided to proceed with their research.
Privacy: Your Right to Keep Secrets
For the most part, individual ‘right to privacy’ is usually contrasted with public ‘right to know’ (Pring, 1984) and this has been defined in the Ethical Guidelines for the Institutional Review Committee for Research with Human Subjects as that which: extends to all information relating to a person’s physical and mental condition, personal circumstances and social relationships which is not already in the public domain.
It gives the individual or collectivity the freedom to decide for themselves when and where, in what circumstances and to what extent their personal attitudes, opinions, habits, eccentricities, doubts and fears are to be communicated to or withheld from others. (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 1981) In the context of research, therefore, ‘right to privacy’ may easily be violated during an investigation or denied after it has been completed. At either point the participant is vulnerable.
Three Ways Privacy Can Be Violated
Privacy has been considered from three different perspectives by Diener and Crandall (1978). These are: the sensitivity of the information being given, the setting being observed, and dissemination of information. Sensitivity of information refers to how personal or potentially threatening the information is that is being collected by the researcher.
Certain kinds of information are more personal than others and may be more threatening. According to a report by the American Psychological Association for example, ‘Religious preferences, sexual practices, income, racial prejudices, and other personal attributes such as intelligence, honesty, and courage are more sensitive items than “name, rank, and serial number”’ (American Psychological Association, 1973).
Thus, the greater the sensitivity of the information, the more safeguards is called for to protect the privacy of the research participant. The setting being observed may vary from very private to completely public. Home, for example, is considered one of the most private settings, and intrusions into people’s homes without their consent are for bidding by law. Dissemination of information concerns the ability to match personal information with the identity of the research participants.
Indeed, personal data are defined at law as those data which uniquely identify the individual providing them. When such information is publicized with names through the media, for example, privacy is seriously violated. The more people there are who can learn about the information, the more concerned there must be about privacy (see Diener and Crandall, 1978).
When Participants Give Up Their Privacy Rights
As is the case with most rights, privacy can be voluntarily relinquished. Research participants may choose to give up their right to privacy by either 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.
Anonymity: Becoming a Ghost in the Data
As Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias say, The obligation to protect the anonymity of research participants and to keep research data confidential is all-inclusive. It should be fulfilled at all costs unless arrangements to the contrary are made with the participants in advance’ (Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias, 1992).
What True Anonymity Really Means
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 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 not identifiable.
Practical Ways to Ensure Anonymity
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 as follows: participants may be asked to use an alias of their own creation or to transfer well-remembered personal data (birthdays or National Insurance number, for instance).
Anonymity may be enhanced if names and other identifiers are linked to the information by a code number. Once the data has been prepared for analysis, anonymity can be maintained by separating identifying information from the research data. Further safeguards include the prevention of duplication of records and passwords to control access to data. (Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias, 1992)
When Anonymity Isn’t Foolproof
These directives 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, categorization of 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. Fortunately, in experimental social psychological research the experimenter is interested in ‘human’ behavior rather than in the behavior of specific individuals, as Aronson and Carlsmith (1969) note.
Consequently, the researcher has absolutely no interest in linking the person as a unique, named individual to actual behavior, and the research data can be transferred to coded, unnamed data sheets. As they comment, the very impersonality of the process is a great advantage ethically because it eliminates some of the negative consequences of the invasion of privacy’ (Aronson and Carlsmith, 1969:33).
Confidentiality: Keeping Shared Secrets Safe
The second way of protecting a participant’s right to privacy is through the promise of confidentiality.
The Trust Contract Between Researcher and Subject
This means that although researchers know who has provided the information or are able to identify participants from the information given, they will in no way make the connection known publicly; the boundaries surrounding the shared secret will be protected. The essence of the matter is the extent to which investigators keep faith with those who have helped them. It is generally at the access stage or at the point where researchers collect their data that they make their position clear to the hosts and/or subjects.
They will thus be quite explicit in explaining to subjects what the meaning and limits of confidentiality are in relation to the research project. Overall, the more sensitive, intimate, or discrediting the information, the greater the obligation on the researcher’s part is to make sure that guarantees of confidentiality are carried out in spirit and letter. Promises must be taken seriously.
Why Strong Confidentiality Promises Matter
In his account of confidentiality and the right to privacy, Kimmel (1988) notes that one general finding that emerges from the empirical literature is that some potential respondents in research on sensitive topics will refuse to cooperate when an assurance of confidentiality is weak, vague, not understood, or thought likely to be breached.
He concludes that the useful ness of data in sensitive research areas may be seriously affected by the researcher’s inability to provide a credible promise of confidentiality. Assurances do not appear to affect co-operation rates in innocuous studies perhaps because, as Kimmel suggests, there is expectation on the part of most potential respondents that confidentiality will be protected.
Four Techniques to Protect Confidentiality
A few techniques have been developed to allow public access to data and information without confidentiality being betrayed. These have been listed by Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias (1992) as follows:
1 Deletion of identifiers (for example, deleting the names, addresses, or other means of identification from the data released on individuals).
2 Crude report categories (for example, releasing the year of birth rather than the specific date, profession but not the specialty within that profession, general information rather than specific).
3 Micro aggregations (that is, the construction of ‘average persons’ from the data on individuals and the release of these data, rather than data on individuals).
4 Error inoculation (deliberately introducing errors into individual records while leaving the aggregate data unchanged). Such techniques ensure that the notion of non-trace ability is upheld.
Betrayal: When Researchers Break Trust
The term ‘betrayal’ is usually applied to those occasions where data disclosed in confidence are revealed publicly in such a way as to cause embarrassment, anxiety, or perhaps suffering to the subject or participant disclosing the information. It is a breach of trust, in contrast to confidentiality, and is often a consequence of selfish motives of either a personal or professional nature. Plummer comments, in sociology, there is something slightly awry when a sociologist can enter a group and a person’s life for a lengthy period, learn their most closely guarded secrets, and then expose them all in a critical light to the public’ (Plummer, 1983).
The Action Research Dilemma
One of the research methods we deal with in this book that is perhaps most vulnerable to betrayal is action research. As Kelly (1989a) notes, this can produce several ethical problems. She says that if we treat teachers as collaborators in our day-to-day interactions, it may seem like betrayal of trust if these interactions are recorded and used as evidence.
This is particularly the case where the evidence is negative. One way out, Kelly suggests, could be to submit reports and evaluations of teachers’ reactions to the teachers involved for comment; to get them to assess their own changing attitudes. She warns, however, that this might work well with teachers who have become converts, but it is more problematic where teachers remain indifferent or hostile to the aims of the research project.
How does one write an honest but critical report of teachers’ attitudes, she asks, if one hopes to continue to work with those involved? As she concludes, our position lies uncomfortably between that of the internal evaluator whose main loyalty is to colleagues and the school, and the external researcher for whom informal comments and small incidents may provide the most revealing data’ (Kelly, 1989a).
Deception: The Art of Lying for Science
The use of deception in social psychological and sociological research has attracted a certain amount of adverse publicity.
What Deception Really Means in Research
In social psycho logical research, the term is applied to that kind of experimental situation where the researcher knowingly conceals the true purpose and conditions of the research, or else positively misinforms the subjects, or exposes them to unduly painful, stressful or embarrassing experiences, without the subjects having knowledge of what is going on. The deception lies in not telling the whole truth.
The Costs vs. Benefits Debate
Advocates of the method feel that if a deception experiment is the only way to discover something of real importance, the truth so discovered is worth the lies told in the process, so long as no harm comes to the subject (see Aronson et al., 1990). The problem from the researcher’s point of view is: What is the proper balance between the interests of science and the thoughtful, humane treatment of people who, innocently, provide the data?’ In other words, the problem again hinges on the costs/benefits ratio.
The pervasiveness of the problem of deception becomes even more apparent when we remember that it is even built into many of our measurement devices, since it is important to keep the respondent ignorant of the personality and attitude dimensions that we wish to investigate.
There are many problems that cannot be investigated without deception and although there is some evidence that most subjects accept without resentment the fact of having been duped once they understand the necessity for it (see, for instance, Festinger and Katz, 1966), it is important to keep in the forefront of one’s mind the question of whether the amount and type of deception is justified by the significance of the study and the unavailability of alternative procedures.
Ethical considerations loom particularly large when second-order deception is involved; that is, letting people believe they are acting as re-searchers or researchers’ accomplices when they are in fact serving as the subjects (i.e., as unknowing participants). Such procedures can undermine the relationship between the researcher and subject, even more than simply misinforming them. The use of deception resulting in particularly harmful consequences would be another occasion where ethical considerations would need to be given priority. An example here would be the study by Campbell, Sanderson and Laverty (1964) which created extremely stressful conditions by using drugs to induce temporary interruption of breathing.
Three Ways to Handle Deception Ethically
Kelman (1967) has suggested three ways of dealing with the problem of deception. First, it is important that we increase our active awareness that it exists as a problem. It is crucial that we always ask ourselves the question whether deception is necessary and justified. We must be wary of the tendency to dismiss the question as irrelevant and to accept deception as a matter of course. Active awareness is thus in itself part of the solution, for it makes the use of deception a focus for discussion, deliberation, investigation, and choice.
The second way of approaching the problem concerns counteracting and minimizing the negative effects of deception. For example, subjects must be selected in a way that will exclude individuals who are especially vulnerable; any potentially harmful manipulation must be kept to a moderate level of intensity; researchers must be sensitive to danger signals in the reactions of subjects and be prepared to deal with crises when they arise; and at the conclusion of the research, they must take time not only to reassure subjects, but also help them work through their feelings about the experience to whatever degree may be required.
The principle that subjects ought not to leave the research situation with greater anxiety or lower levels of self-esteem than they came with is a good one to follow (the issue of non-maleficence again). Desirably, subjects should be enriched by experience and should leave it with the feeling that they have learned something.
Three Ways to Handle Deception Ethically
The primary way of counteracting negative effects of research employing deception is to ensure that adequate feedback is provided at the end of the research or research session. Feedback must be kept inviolable and in no circumstances should subjects be given false feedback or be misled into thinking they are receiving feedback when the researcher is in fact introducing another experimental manipulation. Even here, however, there are dangers.
As Aronson and Carlsmith say: debriefing a subject is not simply a matter of exposing him to the truth. There is nothing magically curative about the truth; indeed…if harshly presented, the truth can be more harmful than no explanation at all. There are vast differences in how this is accomplished, and it is precisely these differences that are of crucial importance in determining whether or not a subject is uncomforted able when he leaves the experimental room. (Aronson and Carlsmith, 1969:31)
They consider that the one essential aspect of the debriefing process is that researchers communicate their own sincerity as scientists seeking the truth and their own discomfort about the fact that they found it necessary to resort to deception to uncover the truth. As they say, ‘No amount of post experimental gentleness is as effective in relieving a subject’s discomfort as an honest accounting of the experimenter’s own discomfort in the situation’ (Aronson and Carlsmith, 1969:31–2).
The third way of dealing with the problem of deception is to ensure that new procedures and novel techniques are developed. It is a question of tapping one’s own creativity in the quest for alternative methods. It has been suggested that role-playing, or ‘as-if’ experiments, could prove a worthwhile avenue to explore—the ‘role-playing versus deception’ debate we raise in post. By this method, as we shall see, the subject is asked to behave as if he/she were a particular person in a particular situation.
Whatever form they take, however, new approaches will involve a radically different set of assumptions about the role of the subject in this type of research. They require us to use subjects’ motivations rather than bypassing them. They may even call for increasing the sophistication of potential subjects, rather than maintaining their naivety. Plummer (1983) informs us that even in an unlikely area like life history, deceptions of a lesser nature occur.
Thus, for example, the general description given of research may leave out some key issues; indeed, to tell the subject what it is you are looking for may bias the outcome quite substantially. Further, different accounts of the research may have to be presented to different groups. He quotes an instance from his own research, a study of sexual minorities, which required various levels of release—for the subjects, for colleagues, for general inquiries, and for outside friends.
None of these accounts actually lied; they merely emphasized a different aspect of the research. In the social sciences, the dilemma of deception, as we have seen, has played an important part in experimental social psychology where subjects are not told the true nature of the experiment.
Going Undercover: The Covert Research Controversy
Another area where it has been increasingly used in recent years is that of sociology, where researchers conceal their identities and ‘con’ their way into alien groups—the overt/ covert debate (Mitchell, 1993). Covert, or secret participation, then, refers to that kind of research where researchers spend an extended period in particular research settings, concealing the fact that they are researchers and pretending to play some other role. Bulmer (1982) notes that such methods have produced an extremely lively ongoing debate and that there are no simple and universally agreed answers to the ethical issues the method produces.
Erikson (1967), for example, makes several points against covert research; among them, that sociologists have responsibilities to their subjects in general and that secret research can injure other people in ways that cannot be anticipated or compensated for afterwards; and that sociologists have responsibilities towards fellow sociologists. Douglas (1976), by contrast, argues that covert observation is a necessary, useful and revealing method.
And Bulmer (1982) concludes that the most compelling argument in favor of covert observation is that it has produced good social science which would not have been possible without the method. It would be churlish, he adds, not to recognize that the use of covert methods has advanced our understanding of society.
The Reality Check: Why Perfect Ethics May Be Impossible
The final word about deception in general goes to Kimmel (1988) who claims that few researchers feel that they can do without deception entirely, since the adoption of an overtly conservative approach could deem the study of important research hardly worth the effort. A study of racial prejudice, for example, accurately labeled as such would certainly affect the behavior of the subjects taking part.
Deception studies, he considers, differ so greatly that even the harshest critics would be hard pressed to state unequivocally that all deception has potentially harmful effects on participants or is otherwise wrong. We turn now to research methods used in educational settings and to some ethical issues associated with them.
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