Beyond “doing no harm”: saddle points in anonymization and masking as socialized practices for new researchers

Abstract

A central challenge to addressing what becomes taken-for-granted in method in educational research is socialization into the field. During graduate training, students and their mentors are challenged by unique projects. Here, authors, two early career scholars and a faculty mentor, offer a critical interrogation of socialization experiences related to methods of anonymizing and masking, questions of responsibilities to varying publics, and the good that research might, or might not, do in the world by sharing a co-constructed narrative based on interactive interviews which took place over six months. The authors identify saddle points, or points of stillness, within these conversations that offer, but do not dictate, considerations for teaching practices of anonymizing and masking as part of qualitative research training and socialization.

Keywords:

• Anonymization
• graduate training
• interactive interviewing
• masking

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Drs. Patrick Daniels and Olympia Nicodemi who offered feedback and critical insights related to our use of the mathematical concept of saddle points.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here, we offer a bit more mathematical detail for the inclined reader. Consider a prototypical saddle point, at (0,0,0) for the surface given by the function f (x, y)= z = x² – y². If you are walking a path along the x-axis (i.e. y = 0, so z = x²) through the saddle point, the saddle point will be the top of a hill. But if you are instead walking a path along the y-axis (i.e. x = 0, so z = –y² ), the saddle point will be to you the bottom of a valley. And still further, if you are walking a “diagonal line” (i.e. x = y, so z = x² – x² = 0), the surface does not change in height at all, and the saddle point is indistinguishable from any other point on your journey.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexandra Panos

Alexandra Panos, PhD (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Literacy Studies and an Affiliate Faculty in Measurement and Research in the College of Education at the University of South Florida. Her scholarship focuses around transdisciplinary critical literacies and spatial considerations in critical qualitative methodologies.

Suraj Uttamchandani

Suraj Uttamchandani (he/him/his) is currently a Visiting Research Scientist at the Center for Research on Learning and Technology at Indiana University (USA), where he previously completed his Ph.D. in the learning sciences. His research centers political forms of learning, participatory forms of research, and critical qualitative methodologies.

Jessica Nina Lester

Jessica Nina Lester, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Inquiry Methodology in the School of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. Much of her scholarship is positioned at the intersection of language-based methodologies and disability studies, with a particular focus on discursive psychology. She also studies and writes about general qualitative methodological concerns, such as establishing quality in qualitative research and designing qualitative studies in digital spaces.