Sticky naming for anonymising participants

Earlier this year, Pat Thomson of "Patters" fame wrote a great blog post on how to anonymise participants via a naming schema. She said that we "researchers find themselves inventing names because it’s standard ethical procedure to anonymise the people we’ve talked with and the places we’ve been" (2022). Absolutely.

But there can be a flaw in naming for anonymity: when we cannot clearly associate each participant with the name we assign (Thomson, 2022). In my Master's project, I simply gave my participant groups initials based on a suburb (in various cities), and a number for the group, so knew that MA1 was place, group A, interview 1. I wrote a key for myself. I did not get lost, and had no trouble keeping track of my data: my naming schema was sticky. My brevity, linked via location, stood me in good stead. Further, I did not identify participants at all aside from a role: either that of "lecturer" or "student". That kept things quite simple too.

But we have to PLAN our naming schema for simplicity. Pat talked about naming schools in a large research project after different trees. The researchers on that project had to keep looking up the anonymised names in a table, and it provided more confusion than it was worth. As she said, they "would have been a lot better off if we’d just stuck with numbers or with something that combined region and school type – Primary Midlands, Secondary Northern". I was thinking they could have gone even simpler with "School 1", "School 2" etc: or "Institution 1", "Institution 2", but hey.

There is some really good advice on using "simple, descriptive choices" where the assigned "name is relevant to the kind of person or place selected for study". Pat also notes that we can use descriptive names which have "some relationship to the research question and analysis" (Thomson, 2022), such as:

• "The names uses chronology e.g. university (new), university (old)
• "The name is relevant to demography e.g. academic (female), academic (non-binary) academic (neurotypical)
• "The names is relevant to size e.g. faculty (small), faculty (medium)
• "The name is relevant to the organisation e.g. academic (temporary), academic (tenured) academic (senior) administrator, clerical staff
• "The name is relevant to magnitude e.g. academic (most cited) academic (least cited) (Thomson, 2022)"

Pat also points out that we can assign anonymised "names which aim to humanise the person so that the reader will see the[ir] words and get an idea of the person speaking" such as "Maria, [or] Fred". However, we have to be careful when anonymising with false names that we do not inadvertently convey class, culture, imply stereotypes, or "steer[....] readers’ expectations". Pat provided a great example of this: "what would you assume about an undergraduate called Rainbow, or one called Tarquin?". Oh yes: a flaky arts student, and a future financier or PM.

B.Com Participant 1, B.Sc Participant 5 is a lot safer. But we need to create ourselves a key. And, should the names prove not sticky enough for us to remember them clearly, we should change them ALL. And change our key.

Sam

Reference: Thomson, P. (23 May 2022). Anonymisation: What's in a name. https://patthomson.net/2022/05/23/%ef%bf%bcanonymisation-whats-in-a-name/