Читать книгу 100 Questions (and Answers) About Research Ethics - Emily E. Anderson - Страница 30

Privacy and confidentiality are two critical concepts that all researchers must address when designing and implementing research. Often assumed to have the same meaning, privacy and confidentiality are, in fact, two discrete but related concepts. An easy way to distinguish the two is to think of privacy as protecting individuals and confidentiality as protecting information—or data—that people share with researchers.

Privacy can be defined as having control over oneself—that is, people can choose when to share information about themselves and with whom. During recruitment, you can protect the privacy of prospective participants by implementing procedures that do not disclose information to others that would identify prospective participants as being part of a specific group, engaging in a specific behavior, or having a specific health condition. During data collection, you can reduce the likelihood of a violation of privacy by implementing procedures that allow participants to share their information with researchers where others cannot hear or see them.

When participants privately share their information with researchers, they expect that their information will remain confidential—that is, they expect that only the research team and other authorized individuals will have access to their data. In a practical sense, confidentiality refers to the specific steps researchers implement to keep information about participants unknown to others, to the extent possible. Federal research regulations require researchers to establish procedures to protect the confidentiality of information that is individually identifiable (meaning, the participant can be identified directly by the researcher or through identifiers that are linked with the data). However, researchers often implement the same confidentiality procedures for all types of data, as they are good standard research practices.

More questions? See #21, #22, and #23.