When anthropologist Cathy Small enrolled as an undergraduate in her own university ten years ago to do the fieldwork that resulted in My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (2005), she knew that she wanted to protect the identities of her participants and institution by referring to them using pseudonyms. She called herself “Rebekah Nathan” (an excellent choice of pseudonym if you ask me) and Northern Arizona University “AnyU” (a play on its initials, NAU).

Small explained that she considered anonymity a standard anthropological practice and that she underestimated the interest her hidden identity would generate. Jacob Gershman, a reporter for the New York Sun, drew from the rich details she included in the book to unmask her and her university before it had even been published. Gershman wrote that, “whether by choice or accident, [she] also planted in her ethnographic study many clues about her identity[:] her university is located near Las Vegas, is surrounded by mountains, and has a hotel and restaurant management school.” The risk of my readers playing detective stuck in my mind as I started working through my own ethical commitments to my participants.

The organization where I did most of my fieldwork — a regional women’s weaving cooperative in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala that exports textiles to the U.S. and Europe — has a strong online presence: in addition to a website, it has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. It has also hosted a large number of tourists, who have recorded their experiences in travel blogs, social media posts, and comments on travel review sites. These materials are typically available for public consumption (with the exception of social media sites that may permit varying degrees of access to their contents, like Facebook, which is an ethical discussion for another day) and present researchers with a tantalizingly rich source of self-presented commentary. However, this easy accessibility also makes it difficult to maintain pseudonyms for the organization and its leaders.

Why was it important for the cooperative federation to have its identity disguised? The board of directors had concerns on a few levels, the most prominent being concern about potential retaliation from members of the military for speaking out about the recent genocidal civil war in Guatemala (1960–1996), which is still highly contested. While the organization’s members spoke freely about their experiences in the war to visiting tourists, they wanted to control the audience and context of their testimonies.

The organization already makes its own decisions about how much information to share and withhold online, in negotiation with its international volunteers. US volunteer “Rosalyn” wanted to share some members’ personal stories of their suffering during the war on the website: “When I came in for a talk they were quite open about their own experiences. The one woman was telling us about how they burned her family alive in their house.” She interviewed the president of the cooperative, who spoke at length about the war and then said that she did not want that material to go on the Internet. Rosalyn discussed a couple of possibilities with the president, including focusing on the parts about her childhood and leaving the war out of the finished interview, or publishing the interview anonymously, without her name or town, and she opted for the former. In talking to tourists and allowing the volunteers to post certain stories and images, the organization is constantly weighing how much risk they are willing to take on, so I viewed my responsibility as mitigating any possible impacts of the stories I shared and using basic techniques to make it so that a casual reader would be less likely to be able to associate the name of the organization with my work.

Practically speaking, is there anything we can do to take advantage of the wealth of data available on blogs and websites without compromising our commitment to our participants? Asking a colleague about this issue, I realized that we had independently come to the same solution to incorporate some blog material without inviting the revelation of institutions’ actual names. We presented a few of the most enticing quotes from blogs, the ones we simply couldn’t let go, as interview material, to discourage readers from plugging the quotes into search engines and finding the original blogs. As a researcher, this is a somewhat unsatisfying compromise, because statements made in a blog, intended to be broadcast to an audience, have a different quality than statements solicited in an interview, and should be analyzed differently. However, our guiding principle has to be to restrict harm above all else.

At other times, I paraphrased what someone had said or deliberately cut out words to make it more difficult to search for the quote online. I also tried to use non-online sources such as flyers rather than web sources when talking about how the cooperative represents itself, and deliberately kept the web sources I used out of the final bibliography.

Once, when I was reading a dissertation about Quetzaltenango, I thought I recognized the organization where I was doing fieldwork, referred to with a pseudonym. The anthropologist cited a substantial amount of online material, and checking the bibliography revealed the organization’s actual name associated with its website! It seems likely that this researcher assigned pseudonyms as a matter of standard anthropological practice, counting on the relative obscurity of his research and site to limit the risk of discovery to the organization. This is the kind of pitfall I hope to avoid by using the strategies described above (and any other approaches you can suggest in the comments).

Scholars have pointed out that many groups and individuals may actually want to be identified by name, to gain recognition or aid in their struggles. However, we don’t always get to take the more straightforward approach of naming names. My goal here is to start a conversation about how to handle situations where our participants have explicitly asked to have their identities masked for reasons of reputation management, legal protection, or personal safety.

Kristin Ghodsee similarly writes of the difficulties she encountered as she researched post-Socialist Muslims in Bulgaria—research that caught the interest of both local and American officials. After being detained and interrogated by Bulgarian officials, she decided to drop almost all of the ethnography from her forthcoming work. She describes her encounter with the state in this way:

He then asked me: “Are you responsible for this?”
“Excuse me?” I said, not quite understanding his implication.
“Is your purpose in Bulgaria to encourage these girls to assert their human rights?”
“No,” I stammered, “I’ve been doing this research since 2004, long before this summer.”
“But you know the girls?”
“Some of them.”
“And the people who are teaching them?”
“They are all the subject of my ongoing research. An academic research project.”
“Good,” he said. He nodded and jotted something down on his clipboard. He finally asked me if I had any questions for him.
“Is this interview a normal procedure for Americans applying for long-term residency?”
“No,” he said, matter-of-factly, “It is only for you.”
“Why me?”
“Your topic is interesting to us.” (Ghodsee 2011, p. 180).

As Ghodsee goes on to suggest, sharing the results of our research in any form, published or unpublished, can attract unwanted attention and present unexpected ethical dilemmas. This is a challenge: how can we ensure the safety and privacy of the people we share life with, and yet convey what we’ve learned. How could we share some raw materials in a way that might inform future scholars–or at least those who agree to keep the ethical norms of our profession?

Or, as the American Anthropological Association’s 2012 code of ethics puts it, how can we “do no harm” and yet “make your results accessible” and “preserve your records“?

Security for ethnographic data

We’ll talk more about sharing research in the next post, but let’s start with how we can secure our records. Below is a sketch of ways to begin securing the ethnographic data you currently gather, and to manage how it is passed along to other researchers when you can no longer care for it. Once again, you’re encouraged to share your experiences in the comments.

Consider what you gather. This is obvious to many of us, but there are times not to gather—or not to record—stories that could be used to harm the people we work with, especially if they’re outside of the scope of our research.

Lock it up. If you need to encrypt sensitive data, do so—but keep a record of passwords and security keys on paper, as well as in a PGP-encrypted digital file (more details here or here). You can look up how to create encrypted volumes on your computer, or talk with campus IT about how you might transmit data directly to secure servers in your home country. Health researchers such as Caroline Kuo are way ahead of us in securely storing and transmitting sensitive stories from vulnerable and remote communities worldwide.

Back it up. Store any important files in multiple formats and locations, both print and digital. The 3-2-1 Rule is a common way to remember this:

Keep 3 copies of any important files
on 2 different types of media (print, digital, CD, computer, flash drive)
with 1 copy being stored in another location and/or offline.

For instance, you could print out digital fieldnotes and lock the papers up. Or, you could scan/snap photos of your paper diaries, storing the scans on a secure computer drive. This multiple formats-multiple locations principle helps to protect your notes in case of theft, fire, decay, and computer or network failures. Backup hard drives should also be locked up and password-protected (but give the password to someone you trust!).

Beware the Cloud. There’s a tradeoff here: storing in more formats and places means you are less likely to lose irreplaceable records, but also increases the chance of hacking or leaked notes. Notes on sensitive topics may not belong in the Cloud, Dropbox, email, or even local computers in the field, as your notes can easily be accessed and personal connections traced.

Write a fieldnotes will. Even before you reach the end of your career, it would be wise to document and share your expectations of who will care (a “fieldnotes will”?) for your documents if you can no longer care for them. Campus archives may be prepared to advise on this, at least for physical materials. ‘Data’ librarians attempt to advise on digital materials. As above, giving passwords to a deeply-trusted person or arranging their access to your future archives will help ensure that your records won’t be lost or inaccessible when it comes time to pass them on.

Talk to a librarian or archivist. Seriously. These people are the campus experts on long-term storage of paper–and increasingly digital–research records, and campus IT may also be able to help in securing your digital files. See also Andrew Asher & Lori M. Jahnke‘s readable exploration of qualitative archiving — if your librarian isn’t familiar with the particularly challenges of safeguarding ethnography, this is a good primer.