Читать книгу Social Work Research Methods - Reginald O. York - Страница 112

Protecting privacy means the study subject remains anonymous regarding the data you employ. You do not report, for example, the depression score of Jane Dougherty or the age of Paul Samuels. No one really does this in social work research, partly because it has no benefits to research and also because of the obvious fact that it provides an ethical problem.

An aid in the protection of the privacy of the study subject is to obtain your information from the subject anonymously. In this way, you do not know the identity of the subject, so you have no opportunity to violate his or her privacy. The other avenue is to assure confidentiality. This means that you will not divulge the identity of the study subject with the data associated with his or her answers to the questions. In either case, you will report to the study subject this information when you are working on the informed consent issue.

Exhibit 3.2 Elements of Informed Consent

Source: The “Element” and “Explanation” are taken from Research Ethics and Compliance (2018).

The social work student may need to match the clients’ pretest scores with their posttest scores for the analysis of data. This can be done anonymously by using a set of questions where the study subject answers questions, not known to the researcher, that provides an anonymous identification number. See, for example, the following set of questions:

_____ ←What is the first letter in your father’s middle name? [If unknown, enter X]

_____ ←What is the number of letters in your mother’s maiden name? [If unknown, enter 9]

_____ ←What is the first letter in your mother’s maiden name? [If unknown, enter X]

_____ ←What is the last digit in your social security number? [If unknown, enter 9]

If you ask the participant to answer these questions on your questionnaire and you must administer the same questionnaire two times, you will be able to match this person’s pretest score with his or her posttest score, but you will not know the identity of this person. You can imagine other questions that might be used to achieve the same.