International Journal of Research & Method in Education

Vol. 28, No. 1, April 2005, pp. 8393

Research ethical guidelines

and anonymity1
Geoffrey Walford*
University of Oxford, UK
International
10.1080/01406720500036786
CWSE103661.sgm
1743-272X
Original
Taylor
102005
28
Oxford
GeoffreyWalford
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University
Article
Francis
Francis
(print)/1743-7288
Journal
2005Group
Department
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of Research
Ltd (online)
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Educational
Method inStudies15
EducationNorham GardensOxfordOX2 6PYgeoffrey.walford@educational-studies.oxford.ac.uk

That researchers should give anonymity to research sites and to the individuals involved in research
is usually taken as an ethical norm. Such a norm is embodied internationally in most of the ethical
guidelines and codes of practice of the various educational, sociological and psychological research
associations and societies. This paper challenges this assumption on the basis that it is usually
impossible to ensure anonymity and that it is often undesirable to try to do so.

Introduction
It is an almost unquestioned belief that anonymity for individuals and research sites
should be the standard ethical practice for educational research. Such a belief is
embodied in the various ethical guidelines and codes of practice produces by such
professional associations as the American Educational Research Association, the
American Sociological Association, the British Sociological Association and the
British Psychological Society. The British Educational Research Association took a
similar view when it published its Revised ethical guidelines for educational research in
April 2004 (BERA, 2004). These replaced earlier guidelines first issues in 1992
(BERA, 1992) and were produced by a small working group of members of the
Association in consultation with other interested parties. The penultimate draft of the
Revised ethical guidelines for educational research were brought to the Annual Meeting
of the British Educational Research Association at its annual conference, held in
September 2003.
As is usually the case, the meeting was small and there was little time available for
real discussion, but one of the paragraphs in this penultimate version caused some
concern amongst a few members (including myself). Following a dispute at the meeting the President agreed to take the matter back to the committee and ask them to
*Oxford University Department of Educational Studies, 15 Norham Gardens, Oxford OX2 6PY,
UK. Email: geoffrey.walford@educational-studies.oxford.ac.uk
ISSN 1743-727X (print)/ISSN 1743-7288 (online)/05/01008311
2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/01406720500036786

84 G. Walford
reconsider the issue. The paragraph under discussion was paragraph 23. In its initial
form it stated:
The confidential and anonymous treatment of participants data is considered the norm
for the conduct of research. Researchers must recognise the participants entitlement to
privacy and must accord them their rights to confidentiality and anonymity, unless they or
their guardians or responsible others, specifically and willingly waive that right. In such
circumstances it is in the researchers interests to have such a waiver in writing.

After reconsideration by the working party a further sentence was added to the original so that the revised paragraph now reads (BERA, 2004):
23. The confidential and anonymous treatment of participants data is considered the
norm for the conduct of research. Researchers must recognise the participants entitlement
to privacy and must accord them their rights to confidentiality and anonymity, unless they
or their guardians or responsible others, specifically and willingly waive that right. In such
circumstances it is in the researchers interests to have such a waiver in writing.
Conversely, researchers must also recognise participants rights to be identified with any
publication of their original work or other inputs, if they so wish. In some contexts it will
be the expectation of participants to be so identified.

The original version was subject to questioning at the meeting for two separate
reasons. The first was that the increasing amount of action research and cooperative
research within education challenges the idea that confidentiality and anonymity
should be regarded as the norm in educational research. While it might be the
accepted norm in many forms of more quantitative research where large numbers of
respondents or subjects complete questionnaires or are experimented on, in many
qualitative research studies co-participants in the research play a vital part in coconstructing and co-conducting the research. Their contribution should thus, if they
wish it, be identified by their names being given prominence in any publications
resulting from the work. While the revised version of paragraph 23 still sees confidentiality and anonymity as the norm, it does now recognize that there are some forms of
educational research where it is ethical to recognise participants rights to be identified with any publication of their original work or other inputs.
In contrast, the second reason why paragraph 23 was questioned has not been
recognized in the reworded guidelines. The second reason is the subject of this paper
and relates to the fact that in many forms of qualitative educational research it is often
actually impossible to offer confidentiality and anonymity. Further, it may be undesirable to try to do so.
Anonymity and confidentiality
It is first necessary to clarify exactly what is meant when it is suggested that we offer
confidentiality and anonymity. Anonymity is reasonably straightforward. At root, it
simply means that we do not name the person or research site involved but, in
research, it is usually extended to mean that we do not include information about any
individual or research site that will enable that individual or research site to be identified by others.

Research ethical guidelines and anonymity 85

Confidential, on the other hand, brings more difficulties. Confidential information
is information that is private or secret. The implication is that what is being said
should not be passed on to others. If, in an interview, someone states that what they
are about to say is confidential, I take it to mean that (while they wish me to know the
facts or the full story) they do not wish me to pass this information on to anyone
else. It is ethical, of course, for researchers to keep confidential any information that
they receive in this waybut it is totally ludicrous to offer confidentiality to respondents about the totality of the information that they give to researchers. The
researchers job is essentially that of generating information from respondents and,
after due analysis, passing this on to others. In short, it is not confidentiality that is
the problem at issue, but that of the anonymity of the people associated with the information. Most information is given in the expectation that it will, in some form or
other, be made public in research publicationsthere would be little point in taking
part in research unless this were the case.
Thus, the bulk of this paper deals with the very common assumption that anonymity should be the norm in educational research.
Anonymity in ethnographic and qualitative case study research
Anonymity is a particular problem with ethnographic work which requires longterm engagement with a group of people who know each other (Massey & Walford,
1998) but it can also apply equally to small-scale interview-only studies or shortterm observational studies. In a wide range of work the practice of giving a false
name to a research site and to the people within it has become almost unquestioned.
Anonymity has become the default option for most ethnographic work in education. It is usually thought of a principle that researchers should simply adhere to
almost without question. Researchers do it simply because it is seen as the ethical
thing to do, to protect those involved in the research from any potential possible
harm or embarrassment deriving from publication of books or articles about them.
It is such a common part of ethnographic or small-scale qualitative work that its use
goes unquestioned.
Yet it often does not work and it is hard to see how it can ever really work if what
is being said in the reports is significant and worthwhile. The fundamental difficulty
is that there are very many people involved with any organization that is the site of an
ethnographic or qualitative case study who know the identity of the researcher. In a
school, for example, the head teacher, teachers, administrative staff and students all
know (or should know) what is going on. In many cases the list may also include
members of the governing body, parents and others connected with the school. The
very essence of ethnography is that the researcher is present in the organization over
an extended period, and such exposure means that a great number of people come to
know the researchers identity. With so many people knowing about the research, it
is very difficult to hide the identity of the school or individuals involved if any of the
reports have local or national exposure. A good journalist can easily find the school
involved through a few telephone calls. Indeed, in some ways any researcher might be

86 G. Walford
concerned if no attempts are made by anyone to identify the schoolare the findings
of so little interest?
A non-educational example can be found in Scheper-Hughes (1979) study of a
particular village in rural Ireland where she conducted an ethnography which tried to
understand why Ireland had the highest rates of hospitalized mental illness in the
world. Her study uncovered a process by which particular children where denied full
adult status so that they remained in Ireland to work the farm and care for their
parents in their old age. The book received the Margaret Mead Award from the
Society of Applied Anthropology in 1980 and was greeted with a storm of controversy. In particular, the findings were not appreciated by Irish-Americans or by those
in the village itself, who felt that she had betrayed them. They had welcomed her into
the village, yet she had written only about the bad things about their livesnothing
good. It was, to the villagers, a one-sided account. Following the publication of the
book, a journalist cycling through the area of Ireland was easily able to identify the
real village through questioning local people. He published articles about it in The
Irish Times, which subsequently exposed the village to a continued tourist gaze. When
Scheper-Hughes returned to the village some 20 years later she was very antagonistically received and was quickly forced to leave the village.
Nespor (2000, p. 549) summarizes the overall problem:
Anonymization protects participants from identification and consequent harm or embarrassment only insofar as local people have no objection to whats written (or cannot be
bothered to read it) and whats written is of too little import to attract the scrutiny of
outsiders.

I have discussed elsewhere (Walford, 2001a) the process of site selection within
educational ethnography. I argued that insufficient attention is often given to the
appropriateness of particular sites for research. It is evident (either from internal
evidence or from personal communications) that studies are frequently undertaken in
particular locations simply because they provide convenient sites for the researchers.
Often, a particular local school is known to the researcher, or contacts can be made
through colleagues or friends. Researchers settle for research sites to which they can
easily gain convenient and ready access rather than thinking through the implications
of particular choices. In my own department at Oxford University, for example, if a
study is to be conducted concerning the English educational system, it is highly likely
that schools within our Partnership Scheme will be selected. The department has very
good relationships with these local schools through its Postgraduate Certificate in
Education and continued professional development work, so the path to access is
smoothed. The inclusion of a few basic facts about the school often narrows the possibilities down to just a handful. It would take only a few telephone calls to identify the
exact school, for head teachers and teachers can be caught off-guard by a call from
someone who already seems to have the knowledge that is being sought.
Of course, it is understandable that academics and research students should
include convenience in their considerations of which sites to approach to try to gain
access. There are time, financial and personal costs to be considered, and a distant

Research ethical guidelines and anonymity 87

location may involve accommodation away from home. Additionally, and obviously,
research can only proceed where access has been achieved, and this is not always
straightforward. There are obvious temptations to accept sites that appear to be
readily available rather than work harder to try to achieve access to the most appropriate sites for the research. I do not believe access is as difficult as some would have
us believe (see Walford, 1999) but the perception of difficulty is widely held. However
choosing a site on the basis of geographical convenience challenge the promises of
anonymity that are so often given.
Other researchers may use a pseudonym for a school but give so much additional
data that the school can be easily recognized. Alan Peshkin, who was one of Americas
most well-known educational ethnographers, provides an interesting example. What
turned out to be his last book before his death was of a private elite college preparatory
high school to which he gave the name Edgewood Academy (Peshkin, 2001).
In one of the early chapters of this latest book Peshkin gave some basic facts about
the elite school in which he conducted the research. Geographically, it is in New
Mexico, has a 312 acre main campus and another 270 nearby mountain acres. Quoting from the prospectus, it is stated that the school has 25% pupils of colour and 30%
receive more than $1,200,000 in financial aid based entirely on demonstrated financial need. It can do this because it has an endowment of approximately $200 million.
My guess is that most American educators could immediately identify the school
from these facts. Being British, it took me a few minutes to do so. First I checked the
private schools in New Mexico in the Handbook of private schools (1991) that I had to
handonly Albuquerque Academy looked likely. I quickly found the schools web
site which told me about the 312 acre main campus and the 270 acre Bear Canyon
tract. I then went into the schools library catalogue and looked under Peshkin. I
found that the school had three copies of the book and the catalogue entry on it helpfully told me that Alan Peshkin spent approximately one year visiting and studying
Albuquerque Academy as preparation for this book. It was absolutely clear which
school was researched and little attempt had been made to disguise its identity.
Similar difficulties with the anonymity of sites are evident in many published
reports. Which British reader has not been able to unearth, for example, the real identities of Gewirtz et als (1995) Local Education Authorities or Gerald Graces (2002)
Diocese (Walford, 2003)? (Interestingly, some of Balls more recent work, while still
using pseudonyms for people, now does name the geographical areas involved: see
Vincent et al., 2004.) Vulliamy (2004, p. 277) gives an example of a Ph.D. thesis he
was examining where he was able to identify an anonymized site simply by typing
five consecutive words from a quoted Ofsted report into an advanced internet search
engine. Within seconds he was looking at the photographs and names of the teachers
about whose working lives and views he was reading in the thesis.
But even if the identity of the community or organization could be concealed, it is
very unlikely that individual anonymity can be maintained through pseudonyms in
relation to the other people involved. Robert Burgess (1985) gives a good example of
the negative impact of presenting some of his research on Bishop MacGregor School
to the staff. While he had used pseudonyms for the four staff involved in the main

88 G. Walford
department he studied, it was not difficult for the head teacher and others to identify
individuals. Within a school, the head teacher and other teachers will know which
teachers were involved in the research and a few details may be sufficient for them to
identify each person quoted or whose activities are described in a report. Moreover,
the people who are in a position to identify individuals are exactly those to whom
exposure has the greatest potential risks of harm or embarrassment. For a teacher to
be identified in a book or article as behaving in an incompetent or racist or sexist way,
for example, could bring great harm on that person. While a few researchers might
think such exposure to be acceptable, I do not believe it is ethically appropriate for
the researcher to act as prosecution, judge and jury with no chance for the teacher
involved to even present any defence.
Put simply, giving anonymity through pseudonyms to sites and people often does
not work. It does not protect organizations from exposure if the reports have sufficiently significant or damaging findings. And, even where the location of the site can
be concealed, it does not protect individuals involved from harm that might result
from exposure to those with the most direct power over them. Ironically, pseudonyms
only act to protect people and organizations where there is little to protect them from.
Why, then, is the promise of anonymity so much an accepted part of most ethnographic and qualitative work? My guess is that anonymity is most frequently initially
offered by researchers as part of an access strategy. It might be argued that, at a time
when teachers and schools are the subject of so much external scrutiny and evaluation, offering anonymity takes some immediate pressure off them. Now that there is
increased choice of school and competition between schools for students, head teachers will try to avoid any possibility of damaging the image of the school, and it is
widely believed that they are more likely agree to research if the school is not to be
mentioned by name in any report. If the research turns out to present the school in a
good light, the school itself can break its anonymity. In a similar way, it is reasonable
to believe that teachers will be more willing to agree to research if they know that their
names will not be used in any report. Again, if the research shows them in a favourable light, they can identify themselves with it.
As far as I know, there is little evidence to support these beliefsindeed, it is difficult to think how such evidence could be found. Denying or agreeing to access can
be due to many different factors and it is not clear that an experiment that tried to
isolate such factors would be ethical. However, it is worth remembering that many
schools have now allowed television cameras into their classrooms and corridors
where they usually have little control over the finished product which can be seen by
millions. Here, not only are the schools named, but so are the individual teachers
whose words and actions can be replayed endlessly to enable any viewer to come to
their own conclusions about particular interactions. If schools are prepared to allow
such detailed and open disclosure by television reporters, documentary filmmakers
and journalists in, why not by researchers?
While promising anonymity is usually seen as an ethical matter, in reality, promising anonymity to schools and individuals where it cannot be maintained is ethically
highly questionable. We might be able to gain access and calm any initial concerns

Research ethical guidelines and anonymity 89

with this promise, but we do so only because the head teachers and others involved
have not fully thought through the impossibility of keeping such a promise if the
school or researcher was put under sufficient pressure or if investigators or all types
made determined attempts.
Perhaps there are other reasons
While promising anonymity is probably most often initially used as a means of fostering access, there may be further reasons for its almost unanimous acceptance in
ethnographic and small-scale qualitative work. In a recent article, Scheper-Hughes
reflects on her research in Ireland and her revisit after 20 years. She writes (ScheperHughes, 2000, p. 128):
Still, were I to be writing the book for the first time and with hindsight, of course there are
things I would do differently. I would be inclined to avoid the cute and conventional use
of pseudonyms. Nor would I attempt to scramble certain identifying features of the individuals portrayed on the naive assumption that these masks and disguises could not be
rather easily decoded by the villagers themselves. I have come to see that the timehonoured practice of bestowing anonymity on our communities and informants fools few
and protects no onesave, perhaps, the anthropologists own skin. And I fear that the
practice makes rogues of us alltoo free with our pens, with the government of our
tongues, and with our loose traditions and interpretations of village life.

Anonymity makes us unmindful that we owe our anthropological subjects the same
degree of courtesy, empathy and friendship in writing as we generally extended to
them face to face where they are not our subjects but our companions without whom
we quite literally could not survive. Sacrificing anonymity means we may have
to write less poignant, more circumspect ethnographies, a high price for any writer to
pay. But our version of the Hippocratic oathto do no harm, in so far as possible, to
our informantswould seem to demand this.
In this article Scheper-Hughes begins to suggest less altruistic reasons for why
anonymity might be offered to participants and organizations that are involved in
ethnographic research. It may benefit the researcher rather than the researched.
Perhaps the idea of anonymity allows researchers to write their books and articles
with less concern for absolute accuracy and to base their arguments on evidence
which may not be as strong as desirable. If named schools and people are being
discussed the need for very strong evidence before claims are made becomes obvious.
At the extreme, writers could be sued for libel in a way that is difficult to do where
names are not used. Researchers are able to hide poor evidence behind the pseudonyms without those researched being able to make a challenge. Using pseudonyms
means that readers are unable to verify any of the material presented in a research
report. Even where a reader believes that he or she knows where the research was
conducted and has contradictory information, it is impossible to challenge the findings as it is never entirely certain which site was the subject of the research (Wolfe,
2003). Indeed, naming a site in any criticism would break the guarantees of
confidentiality offered by the original author.

90 G. Walford
But there are further worrying possibilities. Jan Nespor (2000) sees anonymization
as a representational strategy with interesting ontological and political implications,
the most striking of which, he believes, have to do with the way anonymization naturalizes the decoupling of events from historically and geographically specific locations. In other words, the fact that we do not name a site gives the findings of the
research a spurious generalizability. If we attempt to conceal details about a school,
it becomes a more general placea school that could be any school, a school which
is just one example of many. Ethnographers thus implicitly invite readers to see their
findings as being applicable to other situations. Yet, to be able to understand any
school, readers really need to know the schools history and geographical location, its
physical facilities and appearance, and the nature of the students it serves and the staff
who teach there. Each school is unique in structure and organization. The way it
responds to change can only be understood in the context of its history and sociopolitical location.
While, as readers, we intellectually accept the lack of generalizability of ethnographic work, we are seduced by the lack of specific details about the site and situation
such that the significance of particular pieces of research expands to fill our general
understanding of the issues. Thus, Learning to labour (Willis, 1977) has been widely
taken to explain why working class kids get working class jobs, yet it is based mainly
upon a study of only 12 young men in a single school in a particular social, political
and economic context. Similarly, Beachside comprehensive (Ball, 1981) is seen as
giving information on the effects of banding and streaming in secondary schools and
Rebels without a cause (Aggleton, 1987) is taken to explain some of the middle class
experiences of the transition from school to work. More recently, Jo Boalers (1997)
work in two somewhat contrasting schools has been widely accepted as indicating the
relationship between teaching styles, setting and gender and success in mathematics
teaching, and Gillborn and Youdells (2000) ethnographic study of two schools has
shown the nature of the AC economy that has resulted in secondary schools as a
result of recent policy changes.
The fact that none of the research schools is identified, implicitly gives the writer
and reader the chance to broaden the findings of each study beyond the situations
investigated. It gives a spurious generalizability of time and space to the results of
specific studies. I recognize, of course, that giving the names of places and people
does not automatically stop readers from making unwarranted generalizationsbut
it would certainly make writers more circumspect.
What could be done?
If ethnographers are to name our research sites and even the people within them, it
demands changes to the way access is gained to those sites and in how books and articles are written. It demands a much fuller discussion of the possible effects of research
than is still common.
This is hardly a new idea. Researchers such as Lawrence Stenhouse (1975) and
Helen Simon (1987) wrote about the need to democratize research many years ago.

Research ethical guidelines and anonymity 91

The Centre for Applied Research in Education at the University of East Anglia, UK,
was well-known for its attempts to negotiate each step of its many research projects
with the schools involved. Unfortunately, they were equally well-known for the problems that such a time-consuming process can bring, for the publication of reports can
be delayed or abandoned altogether if it is not possible to come to an agreement on
what should be published. Interestingly, while such processes of negotiation can
shield schools and individuals from public exposure, it is still difficult to protect individuals from harm or embarrassment that might result from internal exposure within
the schools (Snyder, 2002). While teachers can be given control over what is
published, others with power in the school still know who has been involved in
research. To refuse to have anything published once research has been conducted can
still be potentially damaging.
I have no full solution to these problems, but some aspects of my work with the City
Technology College, Kingshurst, do offer a possible way forward. In that research I
undertook a compressed ethnography of the first of a new type of school within a
wider study of the development of that policy at the national and local levels (Walford
& Miller, 1991). The City Technology College initiative was highly politically controversial as the schools were to be non-fee-paying independent schools jointly funded
by central government and industry. I have written elsewhere (Walford, 1991, 2001b)
about the very difficult and highly fraught process by which permission was negotiated into the school. After a long period of trying to negotiate access I came to an
agreement with the Principal of the College that the resulting book should include
both an insiders and an outsiders account of developments. I suggested that she
might write 15,000 words for the book with no editorial control being exercised by
me, if she would give me access to the college and help with information. In order that
I should really understand the college and be able to write about it, she insisted that
I attend for about two days each week and that I went to some of the special college
events during the following term which was, of course, exactly what I wanted to do.
Sadly, in the end, the book did not include this contribution by the Principal. In
order for it to be topical and to make a contribution to the debate, the book had to be
written quickly, and the period for writing coincided with the time that the college
was preparing for its first Post-16 intake. The Principal decided that developing new
courses and planning for a virtual doubling of staff and student numbers were higher
priority activities than writing. I guess that by that time she was also more confident
that I would be honest and fair in the major part of the book, so the perceived need
for her to contribute was lessened.
While far from perfect, the agreement that we came to does offer a model that
might be of wider utility. The key element of it is that, following negotiation about
the nature and scope of the research, the researcher has the right to write an account
and someone in the school has a right of reply. This idea has been put forward previously in various forms (see Lawless, 1992), but the main point is that those about
whom the ethnographer writes should themselves be given a platform. Editorial
control of each part is not ceded to the writer of the other but, of course, both writers
are given the chance to comment on the others work. Such an interchange can be

92 G. Walford
highly beneficial for factual errors or misinterpretations in the report can be indicated.
Given that in most cases a degree of trust will have developed between the various
parties, such a process immediately avoids outright error, and has the potential for a
reduction in misrepresentation.
More controversially, the agreement also recognizes that the researcher has
invested a great deal of time and systematic work in the research, for the researchers
findings are given precedence over the response. It deals with the situation where
researchers not only have responsibilities to those in the research site, but to external
sponsors of research, and to the wider community. Others have a right to know about
the results of systematic research even if those involved would prefer it otherwise.
Democratic research thus recognizes the sometimes competing demands of the many
parties involved in the research processnot just the researcher and the researched.
The agreement also suggests that the researcher will have the leading role in seeking
out potential publishers and guiding submission to academic journalsit is a partnership where all involved have their say, but it is not an equal partnership. In the end,
the researcher is offering the possibility of publication to someone who would otherwise not publish in this way.
The details of such an agreement may still raise considerable problems. For example, it is not always clear who should be given the right of reply. In the case discussed
above, it was evident that the Principal potentially had the most to loose, so should
be allowed to respond. In other cases individual teachers who have cooperated with
the research should be given the right, and there may well be cases where several
replies are required. The further main problem is that it may, indeed, be more difficult to obtain access. On the other hand, the offer of a right of reply might actual
enhance access. As teachers and head teachers become more aware of research
through their own study and involvement with higher degrees, they will become more
aware of the possibility of misunderstanding and misrepresentation. The promise of
a right of reply if something does go wrong may be more of an enticement to become
involved in research than a promise of anonymity that offers little protection and
teachers realize cannot be kept.
Perhaps it is time to take seriously the need to be more open about our research.
As Wolfe (2003) argues:
Transparency is now a virtue much on the public mind, when corporations hide profits,
churches protect criminals, and politicians make unsubstantiated claims for their policies.
Transparency is best achieved by frankness. Research subjects should be told that good
scholarship requires trust between writers and readers, and that such trust is best achieved
when no promises or anonymity are made. Most people would understand and cooperate,
and social scientists would no longer have to engage in deceptive practices, no matter how
innocent the deception.

Note
1.

This paper draws heavily upon and develops a chapter published in Walford (2002) Educational
ethnography and methodology, studies in educational ethnography, volume 6 (Oxford, Elsevier).

Research ethical guidelines and anonymity 93

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