LangeMemo35

One of the ethical conundrums most pressing on me is the issue of confidentiality and anonymity. In many social scientific areas it is common to give interlocutors pseudonyms. This, I think, protects both the researcher and the interlocutor. It protects the interlocutor by ensuring that none of her statements is used to damage her career or other relationships and the researcher by allowing him to speak freely and frankly about his topic without fearing the anger of his interlocutor. Indeed, for these reasons, it is probably easier to speak frankly to a researcher who is going to report the words pseudonymously. Of course, it also protects both parties in ways which are probably harmful. The sociologist Mitch Duneier argues that anonymity protects the researcher by allowing her to misreport or even fabricate data, and, while Duneier doesn’t address it, it is probably the case that anonymity allows interlocutors to lie to researchers with more or less impunity. Now, at the purely abstract level, I am wont to prefer anonymity, or properly pseudonymity, despite the deep problems of trust associated with it. At the practical level, however, this particular route is closed to people myself, and many other STS researchers, who engage not only ethnographically with their interlocutors but also with the publicly available writings of their interlocutors. Even if an social science research does not directly cite the public record, adequate description of a specialized field is often sufficient to deduce the identity of respondents. As an example, when I was an RA in college, studying Cambodian immigrant communities in the US, I read a book in which the researcher had disguised not only her informants names, but also the name of the city where the research was conducted. I was only about 10 pages through the book when I was able to identify the city as Portland, Maine, where I have never been, and from there, the identities of the books primary subjects followed quickly (How many Theravada monks are there in Portland, anyway?) In scientific fields, I imagine the effect is even more pronounced, and anonymity practically impossible. If anonymity is not an option, several more ethical conundrums follow. For example, if I end up critical of the relationship between hydrology and political and economic power, this could seriously damage my not only my rapport with interlocutors, but also might constitute a serious breach of their trust. The double bind will likely be more intense in practice, since in contradistinction to any blanket critique, I will likely end up finding certain subfields and networks in hydrology better than others. I want to document the scientific€ field truthfully, and such an account should be one that all practitioners have no problem reading. However, the lack of anonymity can seriously affect my ability to make normative statements about the trajectory of that field.