However, that doesn’t necessarily allow the researcher to avoid the issues with picking an identifier for themselves. One possible solution to avoid the issue would be to allow participants to pick their own method of referring to themselves. Using “low-income” or “disabled” to describe a student comes with a different set of assumptions than referring to them as “female, 22”. At the same time, the researchers must be aware of how the label might reflect on the participant. Likewise, when it comes to epithets, researchers must decide which characteristics are important and which not are. When it comes to pseudonyms, a researcher must decide whether to pick identifiers that match on some characteristics or avoid the issue all together and use genetic names. For example, consider what information about a participant might be assumed by the names Helga, José, Clarence, and La’Tonia. After all, a person’s name can hold deep personal, social, and symbolic meaning as well as convey information about a person’s ethnicity, age, gender, religion, etc. While all of these methods work are useful for protecting confidentiality, they have various degrees of utility when it comes to providing context and respect for participants’ identities. How much information about the participant’s identity should I include? is a 43 year old, Asian, woman, her codename could be PI/43/A/w.
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However, they can also get complicated quickly, making it hard for a reader to follow. A strength of codenames is that they can be combined or defined to encode certain information easily. Unlike pseudonyms, codenames don’t have to be names in the traditional sense of names, but rather can be index terms such as ID04 or subject 2. or professor rather than use their name.įinally, researchers can use codenames to represent participants. For example, in a study of the dynamics of a research lab, a researcher could refer to the lab’s primary investigator as P.I. Shakespearian or in my case, science fiction).Īlternatively, the researchers can use an epithet and use a descriptive term to describe the person or place. Here, the participant’s name is replaced by a different name, which can be determined at random, alphabetically, by the participant, or through some well known fictional characters (e.g. First, and probably one of the most common in PER, is to use pseudonyms. Today’s paper addresses three main methods to do so.
#Research participants how to
However, the author of today’s paper provides some suggestions and recommendations for how to handle the tradeoff of context and confidentiality. Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple, general answer that will work in all situations. Thus, there exists a tension between giving enough information about the participants to properly contextualize the data but not too much that participant confidentiality might be compromised. The goal of changing the names is to make sure that participants cannot be identified but at the same time, someone’s identity provides crucial context for their lived experiences.
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While changing the names of the participants might seem like a trivial part of the research process, how to best do it remains an open question. I wasn’t given too much guidance on how to do that because it’s something researchers just do. I didn’t know too much about qualitative research at the time, but I knew that I needed to come up with some way to refer to my participants without disclosing their names. The first time I did a qualitative research project, I was a first year graduate student. Click below to access this site.Title: “*Pseudonyms Are Used Throughout”: A Footnote, UnpackedĪuthor’s institution: University of the Highlands and Islands The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) has a website that has videos, brochures and other tools for the public to learn about participating in research and making informed decisions. This group of people often includes behavioral and social scientists, social workers, other professionals, and people from the local community, all working together to make sure that the study is well planned and ethical.Research studies cannot be started until the IRB has approved the study. One way this is accomplished is by having all research studies reviewed by an Institutional Review Board (IRB). We are responsible by federal law for ensuring the protection of the rights, welfare, and well-being of participants involved in these studies.
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Thousands of studies are conducted at UM and JMH, many of which have led to important results that help us lead healthier and better lives.