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Ethics and educational research: philosophical perspectives
Confidentiality, anonymity and privacy
If research is, as Stenhouse portrayed it, ‘systematic and sustained enquiry made public', then it is of its very nature intrusive. Researchers try to dig deeply into human behaviour and its significance, into human experience and human perception of events – and they often pursue their enquiries into places (the home, the classroom, the staffroom, the headteacher's study, the local authority committee room or the Minister's office) which are not normally exposed to public gaze. Not only this, but, as Stenhouse's definition indicates, having collected their data, they then deliberately and importantly place it in the public sphere for all to examine, discuss and interpret in their own terms. So research is inherently about making the (more or less) private public. This is what researchers do – and properly so.
But of course this feature of research, this duty of the researcher, stands in some tension with some other principles which (arguably at least) bear upon the researcher's conduct, for example:
- the right of people to enjoy a certain level or certain areas of privacy in their lives;
- the entitlement of people to protection from harmful effects of eg rendering their personal opinions public or exposing their actions to public attention
- the entitlement of people to share in the credit for or benefits of contributing to research and its publication – or, more strongly, their rights to retain ownership of their ‘intellectual property'
Against claims of this kind researchers – and indeed a wider democratic polity – may place arguments in favour of public exposure based on eg
- the wider accountability of eg government officers or professional workers for what they do in the public and (perhaps in cases of moral decrepitude) the private space
- considerations of ‘public interest'
- claims couched in the form of ‘a right to know'.
These claims and counterclaims; the problems in establishing priorities between them and in considering by reference to what principles or procedures such adjudication can take place; the need which arises to interrogate the language involved in these claims and to draw some finer distinctions – all of this is territory with which philosophers have engaged.
Among the sources which you might find helpful and/or interesting (philosophers sometime end up rendering the apparently simple complex as well as bring clarity to complexity!) are the following:
Pring,R. (1984) ‘Confidentiality and the right to know' in ed, Adelman, C. The politics and ethics of evaluation , London , Croom Helm.
Homan R. (1991) The ethics of social research , Harlow , Longman – chapter 3 is focussed on ‘Privacy' and 6.4 on ‘Confidentiality and Anonymity'.
Gregory, I. (2003) Ethics in Research London , Continuum – chap 5 is on confidentiality
Les Tickle grounds his discussion of some of dilemmas in a particular concrete case in Tickle,L. 2001, Opening windows and closing doors: ethical dilemmas in educational action research, in Journal of Philosophy of Education 35:3 pp 345-360 and also re-issued in eds. McNamee, M. and Bridges D. The ethics of educational research , London Blackwell.
Other parts of this site will include material relevant to these issues too. See, for example, the sections on Access and consent , Insider and Outsider research and Accountability and public responsibility.
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