In defence of anonymity: rejoining the criticism

Abstract

This article is a response to the growing criticisms of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) ethical guidelines on anonymity and pseudonymity as default positions for participants in qualitative educational research. It discusses and responds to those criticisms under four headings—illusion, impossibility and undesirability, access and quality—and extends the explication of difficulties to quantitative approaches using an example from value‐added effectiveness research. The article discusses potential flaws in the arguments made against anonymous and pseudonymous research, and presents some issues for the research community to take forward. Finally, some suggestions are offered for a modified code of practice regarding anonymity and pseudonymity, which attempts a more subtle capture of difficulties in the field and qualifies the existing rationale to take account of previously unconsidered technical concerns.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Geoffrey Walford for his generosity in engaging in a debate on some of the issues covered in this paper.

Notes

1. Using straightforward measures of attainment like the percentage of pupils obtaining five or more General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) grades A*–C (say) would be misleading here because real‐life measures of value‐addedness include measures of GCSE attainment, and Figures 3 and 4 would be most unlikely to occur.

2. The FFT SE model uses factors like prior attainment, month of birth, gender and free school meal entitlement. FFT took a conscious decision not to include ethnicity in their ‘estimates’ models, but have included ethnicity in the ‘retrospective’ SX model.