Confidentiality of research location

[Adelaide9216]

Hello everyone,

I am working on my ethics proposal that I will submit in the following months. I want to interview workers of an organization in my city. In my grant proposals so far, I have always mentioned the name of the organization in question and it's already all over the internet now. But now that I sit down and think about ethics, I wonder if this could cause an issue for confidentiality if my thesis title contains the name of the organization I will be collecting data from...  I will ensure confidentiality of the workers through pseudonyms throughout my thesis, but is that enough? 

What are your thoughts?

[fuzzylogician]

Best suggestion: make an appointment with the REB office at your institution and talk it over with them. They will usually have office hours when you can walk in, or it might be better to schedule an appointment ahead of time. I think there's a question about the nature of the data you'll collect and whether it could potentially harm anyone (for comparison, in my field we actually have a habit of thanking language consultants who we've worked with by name; but depending on what you ask, you may need to take more precautions). If there is anything potentially harmful, then the question is whether a person can be identified by their institutional affiliation and the answers they provide. If so, then you might need to omit the institution name (and ask yourself if, in that case, they are no longer identifiable), or some other identifying information.

[GreenEyedTrombonist]

I agree with @fuzzylogician that this is something to discuss with the REB office. Given the nature of my project, I ended up identifying both organizations with which I worked. All participants for surveys, interviews, and some social media posts were given pseudonyms or their identities were obscured. However, there were some publically available data included where the person, usually a person in power at one of the organizations, was named. Given that this information was not given in confidence and was being pulled from public records (youtube videos, Twitch VoDs, etc), there ended up being no predicted additional harm to the person by including their name (and it helped provide context for some of the comments that could have otherwise been confusing). In short, there are some cases where this is ok and some where it isn't, so, as fuzzy said, it's important to talk it over with the proper authorities before doing something potentially harmful.