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Abstract
Anonymity is often taken-for-granted as an ethical necessity. Discussions around reuse of qualitative data have added further weight to its importance for protecting research participants from unknown future use of data. Yet, anonymisation also compromises the possibilities of future reuse. This paper argues that default anonymisation forecloses discussion of the ethics of naming; it calls for a reorientation of debate, away from an assumption of the universal/ist ethical good of anonymity, towards a politics and ethics of the question of naming. Rather than a slide from an ethic of avoiding harm to a paternalistic notion of protection, I suggest that questions of naming in research, and avoidance of harm, could productively be approached through a feminist ethics of care.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to reviewers for their critical engagement with an earlier draft. Also thanks to other participants at the ESRC Research Methods Festival Panel on ‘Working with Archived Data’ 7 October 2020; to former CRESC colleague Mike Savage (now at University of York), co-author of the presented paper; and to Joan Haran, for comments on an earlier draft.
Notes
1. See http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/create-manage/consent-ethics/anonymisation for further elaboration of the process of anonymisation for qualitative data.
2. There is also a conflation of confidentiality and anonymity, as noted in Wiles et al. Citation2006).
3. For the Nuremberg Code, see http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/guidelines/nuremberg.html and for the Declaration of Helsinki see http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/index.html.
4. It is interesting to note that some journals, e.g. British Journal of Sociology, stipulate that all papers submitted must be anonymised; presumably even if a researcher and/or research participants actually wanted their name to be used.