2. AIMS
This presentation considers ethical issues surrounding
the management of your research data.
In particular it focuses on three important issues,
anonymity, confidentiality and data storage.
4. All research and enquiry involves dealing with
data.
This data can take many different forms eg the
results of surveys, observations or interviews.
Managing your research data in an ethical
manner is crucial to the research process.
In particular, ensuring that you consider how
best to create, store, protect, share and
preserve your data is essential.
6. RESEARCH PRACTICES MUST ENSURE THAT
RESEARCH DATA AND RECORDS ARE:
Accurate, complete,
authentic and reliable
Identifiable, retrievable,
and accessible
Retained in a safe and
secure manner
Retained in a manner
that is compliant with
legal obligations
Available to others in
line with appropriate
ethical, data sharing and
open access principles
Commensurate with the
legitimate interests and
protection of human
participants of research
data.
Mentioned in (UWTSD
Research Data
Management statement,
2018)
7. ANONYMITY AND CONFIDENTIALITY
‘The confidential and anonymous treatment of participants’ data is
considered the norm for the conduct of research’ (BERA, 2018:21)
The participants in your research have the right to privacy.
This is achieved through ensuring you manage your research
data with confidentiality and anonymity in mind.
8. ANONYMITY
Being able to share your research is important. However, ethically we
must protect our participants.
Anonymity is a valuable tool in allowing us to do this.
Maintaining anonymity means that you do not collect identifying
information (such as name, address) for your participants.
Or, if your study requires this type of information as part of the
research design, the data is stored so that individual responses
cannot be linked directly to individuals.
9. HOW CAN YOU ANONYMISE DATA?
The process of anonymising data requires that identifiers are changed in some way.
This might mean identifying information is removed, substituted, distorted,
generalised or aggregated.
Remember that a person's identity can be disclosed from: Direct identifiers such as
names, postcode information or pictures.
Indirect identifiers which, when linked with other available information, could identify
someone, for example information on workplace, occupation, salary or age.
10. BUT REMEMBER
Many studies do not need to collect any personal information at all.
However, anonymity is not necessarily the default position to take:
‘in some circumstances individual participants, or their guardians or responsible others, may want to
specifically and willingly waive their right to confidentiality and anonymity: researchers should
recognise participants’ rights to be identified in any publication of their original works or other inputs
if they so wish’
(BERA, 2018:21).
11. FOR INSTANCE
Your research might highlight some effective teaching strategies taking place in
your school which you wish to disseminate in your cluster (or more widely).
In this case, you might decide to waive the right to keep the school name, or your
specific year group anonymous.
However, you may still decide to maintain the anonymity of individual teachers
and pupils within the school.
12. CONFIDENTIALITY
Confidentiality is usually maintained. This happens when the data collected can identify
individuals in some way, for example if you are carrying out a case study of an
individual pupil.
Confidentiality means that only the investigator(s) or members of the research team
can identify the responses of individuals.
The researchers must make every effort to prevent anyone from outside of the
study connecting individuals with their responses.
Individuals who give consent to be identified (i.e. who waive their right to
confidentiality) must be fully aware of who will be able to see their information, and
the purposes of this.
13. COMPLIANCE: THE GENERAL DATA
PROTECTION REGULATION (GDPR) AND
RESEARCH
The core principles of GDPR are the principles of ethical research data management:
Collect no more data than is necessary from an individual for the purpose for which it will be used;
Obtain personal data fairly from the individual by giving them notice of the collection, and its specific purpose;
Retain the data for no longer than is necessary for that specified purpose;
Keep data safe and secure;
Provide an individual with a copy of his or her personal data if they request it.
14. STORING YOUR RESEARCH DATA
You must ensure that you store your research data securely.
For example, you may use electronic devices which have password protection and data encryption.
You may avoid using portable storage devices like USB sticks
Data should not be sent via email or other forms of media that can be hacked.
Hard copies of any records should be stored in secure premises.
All members of a research team should understand how to protect the data.
See BERA (2018: 25).
15. FIND OUT MORE
• THE UK DATA ARCHIVE HAS A
COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE ON CONSENT,
CONFIDENTIALITY AND ETHICS.
• BERA (2018) ETHICAL GUIDELINES FOR
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
