I have found it helpfulto rename the interviewees first up. For one project, where husbands and wives were interviewed, I called the first couple I interviewed Andrew and Alison, the next Brenda and Bill and soon. I did the transcribing, so could change names as I wrote . For another, I asked interviewees what name they wished me to use in the report, and got the transcript typist to alter the script (using find and replace) wherever the name occurred.I think that you could do the same for a focus group with a bit of effort.
If the names are changed at the outset, any documents like face-sheets with demographic details can simply have the new names inserted and the filing system develops with the false names.
All coding and analysis relates to the names that will appear in the report, and distance between you and respondent is not affected.
You then only need a list identifying real names for project administration purposes, for example if you want to re-contact the actual people. It can (indeed should) be kept quite separate from any other data.
There is a danger here of course. If you should meet your interviewees socially long after the report is written, you'll probably say the false name not the real one when you greet them. (I know because I've done it!)
On the related and trickier issue of ethics, I'll be facing the problem next year. At one stage, my uni set up an undergrad approval process that was delegated to faculties. As far as I know it hasn't been revoked. So my tentative solution is for me to set up some projects with rather broad outlines (eg 'interviews may be held with small numbers of people drawn from the following groups...') well ahead of teaching commencing. I'll fill out the required forms and get them approved by our faculty ethics committee, with me then having the duty and the authority to oversee the details of how interviews, observation techniques etc are done by students
In the course,students will be required to choose one of the projects and work out a very small piece of research to do (like observing another class for one day, or a focus group of five, or two in-depth- interviews). I'm hoping that groups might agree to pool data too.
Students will fill out the ethics form for their particular venison of the project as an assignment, and I'll use it both as assessment for their capacity to plan a research project and to check that they are treating respondents ethically. I'd love to know of other ways people tackle this one- and I haven't yet run it past our ethics committee so I don't know if it will fall foul of the increasingly stringent demands that come from bodies like our Aust. NHMRC.
Hope this helps
Helen Marshall
Dr Helen Marshall
Senior Lecturer,
Coordinator of context Curriculum
School of Social Science and Planning
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
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On a related topic, would anyone be willing to share how you deal with
naming your documents that are interviews in your computer databases?
Confidentiality would require you to not name your documents with the
name of the interviewees. If you use a code instead of the person's
name, however, then your list of cases becomes a list of codes and you
would have to keep a separate index connecting names of subjects/
interviewees with the code. As you read and code your documents and
analyze your data, if you have 50+ subjects, it becomes difficult to
remember who the speaker is without going back and forth to your code
list. Are there any rules applying to this issue?
I have wondered if that increases "objectivity" or if it leads the
reader to disconnect pieces of speech from the entire context of the
interview and thus loose meaning.
Dora Acherman
Florida International University
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