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Qualitative Research
2015, Vol. 15(5) 616 –632
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1468794114550439
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Q
R
Anonymising interview data:
challenges and compromise
in practice
Benjamin Saunders
Keele University, UK
Jenny Kitzinger
Cardiff University, UK
Celia Kitzinger
University of York, UK
Abstract
Anonymising qualitative research data can be challenging, especially in highly sensitive contexts
such as catastrophic brain injury and end-of-life decision-making. Using examples from in-depth
interviews with family members of people in vegetative and minimally conscious states, this article
discusses the issues we faced in trying to maximise participant anonymity alongside maintaining
the integrity of our data. We discuss how we developed elaborate, context-sensitive strategies
to try to preserve the richness of the interview material wherever possible while also protecting
participants. This discussion of the practical and ethical details of anonymising is designed to add
to the largely theoretical literature on this topic and to be of illustrative use to other researchers
confronting similar dilemmas.
Keywords
anonymity, coma, confidentiality, minimally conscious, research ethics, serious brain injury,
vegetative
Introduction
This article addresses the practical and ethical challenges faced when anonymising quali-
tative interview data. We draw on examples from our interview study with more than 50
individuals who have a relative with a chronic disorder of consciousness, i.e. who are in a
Corresponding author:
Celia Kitzinger, Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Wentworth College, University of York,
W/205a, Heslington YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: Celia.kitzinger@york.ac.uk
550439QRJ0010.1177/1468794114550439Qualitative ResearchSaunders et al.
research-article2014
Article
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Saunders et al. 617
vegetative or minimally conscious state with little or no awareness of themselves or their
environment. This is a highly sensitive and contentious area – especially when it comes to
decision-making about serious medical treatments, which was one of the key areas
addressed in our research. We examine the issues that arose as we attempted to anonymise
these data, and we provide empirical examples that invite readers to consider what choices
they would make if faced with similar issues. It is through this focus on practice that the
original contribution of this article will be made. The aim is to complement the growing
theoretical literature on anonymisation (which often debates the issues at a mainly abstract
level) and to be of practical use to other researchers encountering similar challenges.
Defining anonymity
In much previous literature ‘anonymity’ has commonly been used either interchangeably
with, or conflated with, ‘confidentiality’ (e.g. Kaiser, 2009; Tolich, 2004). For us, ‘con-
fidentiality’ is a generic term that refers to all information that is kept hidden from eve-
ryone except the primary research team. Anonymity is one form of confidentiality – that
of keeping participants’ identities secret. However, confidentiality also includes keeping
private what is said by the participants, something only achievable through researchers
choosing not to share parts of the data.
An idealised view of anonymity is that a person will never be traceable from the data
presented about them. As we will show, however, guaranteeing complete anonymity to
participants can be an ‘unachievable goal’ in qualitative research (Van den Hoonaard,
2003: 141). Some commentators argue that since the primary researchers know who
participants are, true anonymity is by definition never achievable, i.e. there will always
be at least one person with access to participant information (Scott, 2005: 247). In most
contexts, however, in-depth qualitative research could not be carried out without breach-
ing anonymity so defined: researchers not only know participants’ identities, but usually
meet them in person. For this reason we would argue that it rarely makes sense to define
‘anonymity’ in the research context so broadly: the primary researchers will always be in
the know. In what follows we address the question of anonymity insofar as it applies to
persons other than the primary researchers.
Anonymising data: a balancing act
The process of anonymisation is a complex, and far from water-tight process, in which
changing people’s names or disguising locations are only first steps in a more nuanced
process around managing ‘identifying details’. Anonymity is a continuum (from fully
anonymous to very nearly identifiable) (Scott, 2005: 249), along which researchers bal-
ance two competing priorities: maximising protection of participants’ identities and
maintaining the value and integrity of the data.
Many official ethics guidelines recommend disguising the personal identities of
research participants as a default position – see, for example, the Statement of Ethical
Practice for the British Sociological Association (BSA, 2002), and the Economic and
Social Research Council’s Framework for Research Ethics (ESRC, 2012). This represents
the ‘normalisation’ of anonymity (Tilley and Woodthorpe, 2011: 198). Others recommend
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618 Qualitative Research 15(5)
respecting the wishes of participants either for anonymity or to ‘receive recognition’
(Canadian Sociological Association (CSA), 2012: s.13, Statement of Professional Ethics)
and anthropologists, in particular, have long been concerned about informants’ requests to
be properly credited (Cassell and Jacobs, 1987). The ethics of ‘anonymity by default’ is
challenged by critics who champion the empowering effect that they claim can be fostered
by participant identification (Giordano et al., 2007; Grinyer, 2002) and argue against
paternalism and an exaggeration of the proposed ‘harm’ that may result from lack of ano-
nymity (Moore, 2012). Others highlight the negative effects that default anonymisation
can have on research outcomes (e.g. Walford, 2005: 2), arguing, for example, that keeping
places and settings hidden ‘naturalizes the decoupling of events from historically and
geographically specific locations’ (Nespor, 2000: 549), or that anonymisation can leave
underlying power structures unchallenged, preventing the pursuit of transformative
research goals (Baez, 2002).
There are also practical challenges. Concealing identities can sometimes be virtually
impossible (Van den Hoonaard, 2003). Anyone closely tied to a particular research set-
ting will likely be able to recognise participants and places (Nespor, 2000; Scheper-
Hughes, 2000), what Tolich (2004) refers to as threats to ‘internal confidentiality’; and
since academics tend to use geographically convenient locations this makes research
sites more easily traceable (Walford, 2005). However, commentators also point out that
the difficulties faced in anonymising do not justify its abandonment (Kelly, 2009), that
many research participants still wish their identities to be concealed (e.g. Corden and
Sainsbury, 2006) and that they often do not have a clear idea about how their words will
be used, such that the future harm from naming participants cannot always be reliably
predicted (Wiles et al., 2012: 47).
The debate summarised above highlights the need for a contextually-contingent
approach to anonymising data. Those writers who have defended the principle of ano-
nymity as default do not necessarily equate this with ‘blanket’ anonymisation, i.e. disguis-
ing every single identifying detail mentioned, which corresponds with the advice of most
ethics guidelines, e.g. Qualidata (the specialist ESRC qualitative data archiving service)
and the British Sociological Association guidelines (BSA, 2002: 5). However, these bod-
ies give little advice about how to anonymise in practice; and with the exception of a few
detailed accounts of challenges in particular projects (e.g. Clark, 2006; Clough and
Conigrave, 2008; Kaiser, 2009), this gap is also evident in the broader academic literature
debating anonymisation issues. This article contributes toward filling this gap.
Research context and method: challenges for anonymisation
Our research explored family experiences of having a relative in a prolonged disorder of
consciousness – either a vegetative state (VS) where the patient is diagnosed as having
no awareness of self or environment, or a minimally conscious state (MCS) in which the
patient has only minimal and intermittent awareness. The second and third authors are
the Principal Investigators (PIs) on the project. The first author is the Research Associate
whose responsibility it was to anonymise the transcripts and upload them into a data
management programme which was shared with a larger interdisciplinary research group
across two universities. The group’s publications draw on our interview analysis to show
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Saunders et al. 619
how families of severely brain injured individuals experience decision-making about
serious medical treatments (Kitzinger J and Kitzinger C, 2013; Kitzinger C and Kitzinger
J, 2014), how they understand ‘consciousness’ (Nettleton et al., 2014), construct ‘death’
(Holland et al., 2014) and engage with the law (Halliday et al., 2014).
Anonymisation in this project was particularly important. Participants shared very sen-
sitive and personal information, not only about themselves, but also about third parties.
The patients they are talking about are profoundly incapacitated, and our interviewees
revealed intimate details about their conditions and treatments. Many also discussed end-
of-life decision-making in relation to their relative, and sometimes said things that they
explicitly stated they had never (and would never) voice to anyone else (e.g. that they
wished their relative had died). With this in mind, we assured participants that we would
endeavour to keep their identities hidden as far as we could through changing their names
and the names of anyone else they mention (e.g. treating clinicians), as well as disguising
place names and particular identifying details. However, participants were also made
aware of the limits to the anonymity we could offer, as well as the challenges that can be
posed to maintaining anonymity, as discussed throughout the rest of this article.
Anonymisation in this project was particularly challenging. First, the two PIs who
designed the research, recruited participants and conducted all the interviews (Jenny
Kitzinger and Celia Kitzinger) have ‘insider’ status: their sister, Polly Kitzinger, was
severely brain injured in a car crash in 2009. As other researchers have noted, insider
research is associated with a set of particular benefits and dilemmas (e.g. Breen, 2007;
Taylor, 2011); it clearly helped with recruitment and increased participants’ willingness
to share their experiences, and to do so very openly, but it also posed challenges for ano-
nymity. In some interviews, participants drew on shared ‘insider’ knowledge about par-
ticular healthcare settings, and healthcare professionals. This makes their identities
potentially traceable, since the identities of the PIs, and their brain-injured sister, is pub-
lic knowledge (Kitzinger C and Kitzinger J, 2011). Second, there are relatively few
patients in the UK with chronic disorders of consciousness. This ‘small population’ prob-
lem has been discussed in relation to ethnographic studies (Van den Hoonaard, 2003;
Walford, 2005), which often focus on a particular village or town, where there is a high
risk that individuals may recognise themselves in the talk of others (e.g. Hopkins, 1993,
or see problems encountered in relation to Carolyn Ellis’ account of Fisher Folk (1986)
discussed in Ellis, 1995). However, similar problems can arise with a geographically
dispersed population with unusual characteristics. We recruited from across the UK but
some families had already met each other – or we learned that they had done so subse-
quent to our interviews – in specialist rehabilitation settings (of which there are very few
across the UK), or through charities and support groups, including online forums. Most
were also in contact with the same small set of experts (e.g. experts in assessing con-
sciousness or in related legal issues).
The insularity of our research context posed a threat to what Tolich (2004) terms
‘internal’ confidentiality – raising the possibility of participants identifying themselves,
or other members of their own family or from other families with whom they have had
contact. This possibility was increased by our use of ‘snowball sampling’, including
deliberately pursuing interviews with different members of the same family – some of
whom did not want parts of what they said to be identifiable to other family members.
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620 Qualitative Research 15(5)
There was also a risk to anonymity in relation to what Tolich (2004) refers to as
‘external’ confidentiality. Tolich’s use of the term confidentiality relates to the ‘protec-
tion against identification’ (2004: 101), thus equating with our use of the term ‘anonym-
ity’. Our participants might be identified by some members of the intended audience for
our research findings – which includes the leading medical, scientific and legal experts
in the field. The small number of PVS/MCS patients means that an idiosyncratic detail
such as a quoted vocalisation from a patient (e.g. calling out a particular word while
apparently in a vegetative state) could identify that patient and his/her family to the
medical or legal professionals involved. A reference to participation in scientific trials
might be similarly revealing – a pertinent issue as we deliberately sought to interview
families with experience of the novel neurotechnology, fMRI (see Samuel and Kitzinger
J, 2013). Likewise, we sought out interviews with those rare families involved in legal
cases for withdrawal of artificial nutrition and hydration (Kitzinger C and Kitzinger J,
2014), of which there have been fewer than 100 cases in total in England and Wales since
1993 to the present.
A further complication is the issue of the ‘small world’ (or ‘global village’) estab-
lished via the world wide web – in which what one might know within a family, com-
munity, service user or professional network becomes potentially available to anyone
with online access. Our capacity to ensure anonymity was compromised by the availabil-
ity of transcripts of court cases, coroners’ reports and media coverage related to some
families, as well as participants’ own use of social media to campaign (e.g. to raise funds
for treatment) (see also Wiles et al., 2012; Saunders et al., 2014).
In the following sections we will discuss how we attempted to tackle the challenges
that arose and provide examples of what we did in relation to the following factors:
1) People’s names
2) Places
3) Religious or cultural background
4) Occupation
5) Family relationships
6) Other potentially identifying information
In selecting illustrative examples of where anonymity was particularly problematic we
have to ensure that we do not breach the very anonymity we have tried to protect. The
examples presented in this article are all drawn from our already anonymised dataset.
Because we cannot (without breaching anonymity) compare what was actually said with
our anonymised version of it, we have in some cases developed a second anonymised
version of the same data especially for this article.
Anonymising: six key areas
People’s names
The most common form of anonymisation discussed in the literature (see, for instance,
Clark, 2006: 5; Moore, 2012: 332) consists of assigning pseudonyms. Some research
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Saunders et al. 621
participants wanted us to use their own names and that of the patient. They felt that their
relative had been stripped of their identity/voice first by the brain injury and then by a sys-
tem which ignored their prior expressed values and beliefs and silenced those attempting to
represent them (similar passionate wishes to be identified have been reported by other
researchers, e.g. one mother saw the use of pseudonyms as a betrayal of her dead son’s
memory: Grinyer, 2002: 3). Despite this, we reluctantly took the decision to avoid naming
interviewees wherever this could be negotiated – especially since at times there were also
legal issues (e.g. where a court required that the identity of a patient should be protected).
Naming some participants might reveal the identities of people they talked about (Clark,
2006) and might also compromise the anonymity of other interviewees (Kelly, 2009).
In choosing pseudonyms, we wanted to avoid revealing too much about the ethnic/
cultural backgrounds of participants (see ‘Religious and cultural backgrounds’ section,
below), but we did select names that would at least in some way resonate with them
(Grinyer, 2002: 3). Of course another option would have been to avoid pseudonyms
altogether – especially given that other studies suggest that some participants may prefer
simply to be referred to by characteristics of gender and age-range (see Corden and
Sainsbury, 2006). This seemed to us, however, to be quite impersonal and also would
make it harder for readers to follow individual narratives. (For an account of why we
opted for names rather than numbers, see Kitzinger J and Samuel, 2014: 6–7.)
On occasion, however, anonymising required us to prevent readers from recognis-
ing that two data extracts were spoken by the same person (e.g. when neither extract
on its own threatened anonymity but might in combination make identification possi-
ble). Then we sometimes did avoid using a pseudonym for one of the extracts or went
further and created a smoke screen by attributing different pseudonyms to each extract.
(For other examples of this smoke screen strategy, see Kaiser, 2009). This is clearly a
compromise in relation to the integrity of the data, and could mislead readers, but we
judged it necessary when (for example) interviewees expressed concerns about endan-
gering relationships with clinicians to whom they referred using derogatory nicknames
(e.g. ‘Mr God Almighty’) or when they described certain contentious activities such as
smuggling pets into the hospital, taking illegal recreational drugs into the care home,
or reading their relative’s medical notes when they were not entitled to do so.
Interestingly some interviewees seemed quite fluent in strategies for anonymising –
perhaps because some had become familiar with managing parallel identities on the
internet. For example, one woman suggested changing pseudonyms for her, as she
reflected on some highly personal information about the impact of her husband’s brain
injury on her own life:
Extract 1
The thing is me and John [husband] had quite a – obviously if you use this part I would change
the [pseudonymous] names [our emphasis] – we had a very dominating relationship […] I was
very overpowered by John. And I had no say in anything I did […]. The music I listened to, the
TV shows I watched, everything was very controlled. […] Even walking to the bus stop you
know, [he’d say] ‘I’m coming with you’, but I knew it was just to check I wasn’t running off
with somebody else. It was very, very restrictive. […] He wasn’t violent towards me, but he’d
be the kind that would throw a wardrobe next to me.
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This interviewee had fought tirelessly against some clinicians’ suggestions that further
life-sustaining treatment for her husband might be futile, and she had found her own
voice in the process.
Extract 1 (continued)
I have to say I found liberation through John’s tragedy. And whilst I’ve been very careful who I
say that to, it’s the truth. You know, through what’s happened to him I’ve found myself. […] So
it’s been empowering in his disempowerment. And it’s really horrible to say that, but it’s true.
Given the sensitive nature of these comments we followed the interviewee’s own sugges-
tions, using a pseudonym for this extract which is different from the pseudonym used for
other quotes from her. In addition, we edited out specific identifying details (e.g. that she
has now joined a dance class, something which her husband had previously forbidden [a
fictionalised example]).
In other cases, it was interviewer, rather than interviewee, who initiated discussion of
the option of omitting a pseudonym or using multiple pseudonyms. For example, after
one mother described an occasion when she thought about killing her severely brain
injured son (not, in fact, an unusual experience for our interviewees, see Kitzinger J and
Kitzinger C, 2013):
Extract 2
I thought ‘if I loved him as much as I say I do, I would not permit this [suffering]’. […] And I
stood there looking at him […] thinking ‘I could do this. I could. I know exactly what to do. All
I’ve got to do is put my thumb over his trachy [tracheostomy, pipe into his throat] and his pillow
over his face. It’d be done in five minutes.’
At the end of this interview, the researcher suggested it might be appropriate to take
extra precautions to ensure that this episode was anonymised, and the interviewee agreed
(‘I don’t think I’ve actually – well [two family members] know about that, but I haven’t
told anybody else’). Although she wanted her anonymity protected, this interviewee
actively wanted to have this part of her interview used:
… to illustrate the point that if there is not a safe option [to allow a dignified death] then people
– when they’re overwhelmed with tiredness, grief, desperation and hopelessness – will put the
boundaries aside just to do something to ease an unbearable situation.
As well as ‘ring-fencing’ particularly sensitive extracts, using two pseudonyms for the
same person also enabled us to include some potentially identifiable aspect of a narrative
in some circumstances. For example, in an article focusing on participants’ engagement
with the law (Halliday et al., 2014), we included data from two families in which the
patient had been killed by another member of the family (both involving subsequent
legal proceedings that received media coverage). In this one article we used pseudonyms
different from those used in our other publications to reduce the likelihood that any iden-
tification made possible by our use of these particular extracts would compromise the
anonymity of extracts from the same individual used in other articles.
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Places
Our assignment of ‘place’ pseudonyms followed the same principles outlined above,
and we commonly replaced identifying places with numbers (e.g. ‘Hospital 1’,
‘Hospital 2’) or generalised descriptions (e.g. ‘Southampton’ became ‘South Eastern
English city’). Such anonymisation represents yet another compromise to the integ-
rity of the data as anonymising places can result in decontextualisation, limiting the
scope for analysis (Baez, 2002; Nespor, 2000). However, the small number of health-
care institutions specialising in treating serious brain injury means that naming these,
or even the town/city in which they are located, could lead to the identification of
particular families, as well as the clinicians who worked with them. We did, however,
ensure that settings were not entirely decontextualised by differentiating between
England/Wales and the Republic of Ireland, for instance (and between countries
inside and outside the EU), since these distinctions might be relevant due to transna-
tional variations in legal framework and healthcare policies. A reference to a patient’s
injury having occurred while skiing in Bulgaria, for example, may be replaced with
‘sporting accident’ in ‘Overseas, EU country no.1’, and so forth. For our own analytic
purposes, we also kept track of every individual care setting mentioned to inform a
forthcoming publication about how people talk about particular settings, such as a
modern neurorehabilitation unit or the Victorian hospital building, thereby addressing
some of Nespor’s (2000: 549) concerns about the ‘decoupling of events from histori-
cally and geographically specific locations’. For this particular publication exploring
talk about settings, we plan to cross-link locations but to remove or change pseudo-
nyms, allowing a discussion of ‘place’ without revealing which of our interviewees
was linked to which location.
Religious and cultural backgrounds
References to interviewees’ religious, cultural or ethnic background could result in
‘deductive disclosure’ (Kaiser, 2009: 1632) compromising anonymity. Following the
advice of ethical guidelines, such as those offered by Qualidata (UK Data Service, 2013),
we often replaced religion/culture with similar but unrelated items, or with generalised
descriptions (e.g. Jaspal’s Hinduism became ‘Jaspal’s religious faith’).
This strategy became problematic when religion, culture or ethnic identity was not
simply ‘background information’ but crucial ‘context for deeper and fuller understand-
ing’ (Clark, 2006: 6). After lengthy discussion we decided to retain certain features in
some cases. For example George’s brother, David, had been injured six years prior to
the interview, and at the time was diagnosed by medical professionals as having ‘low
awareness’. George and his wife, Linda, (interviewed together) were very optimistic
about David’s situation. Their religion underpinned their shared views about David’s
future, along with a strong sense of family togetherness that they associated with their
cultural heritage (from outside the UK). They consistently represented these factors as
underpinning their belief in David’s ongoing recovery, as illustrated in the following
extract:
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Extract 3
Interviewer: You have very strong family values. That comes through.
George: Yeah.
Linda: Mm.
Int: Do you have religious beliefs as well?
George: Oh yeah, we’re [specified faith].
Linda: Yes, yes.
George: My [relative’s] a [religious leader]. So, yeah.
Int: And does this influence your approach, do you think?
Linda: Ah, saying about the [place of worship] now. We take
David to the [place of worship] as well. And the first day we
took David to [place of worship] […] I gave him the
candle, David, and he went like this [miming clenching hand around
candle] […] The other time when we lit a candle and gave it to him,
he was holding it like that. And he was holding it for a while and then
he would go like that [miming hand going lax].
Although it was the interviewer who initially raised the topic of religious faith, the joint
narrative that George and Linda subsequently constructed clearly indicates the impor-
tance of religion in their lives and they went on to explain at length how David interacted
with other artefacts crucial to their religion and how this informed their belief that David
had more understanding than the doctors had predicted. They saw David’s actions as
clear evidence that he was able to recall the significance of religious objects, and thereby
to connect with the beliefs he held prior to his accident – such that an important part of
his identity had survived the devastating brain injury.
In partially anonymising this example by removing reference to any specific religion
(although even ‘candles’ are only relevant in some religions and not others) we tried to
do justice to the story that George and Linda were telling without being too specific. We
suspected that, so strong were their religious and cultural values, George and Linda
would not have been comfortable if we had represented them as belonging to a different
religious faith or culture. We compromised through cutting references which would nar-
row down identification of their religion/cultural background too tightly – this involved
losing some very interesting data but seemed a reasonable compromise, albeit one which
made the quotations much more anodyne than they had been in the original form. The
question we ask ourselves here is whether we have veered too far, and ‘white-washed’
the data, ‘forfeiting much of the richness yielded by the study’ (Parry and Mauthner,
2004: 144) and draining it of meaning?
Occupation
Like religious and cultural beliefs, occupation too could be highly salient to our interview-
ees and therefore difficult to simply remove or alter. Where possible we again followed the
advice of ethical guidelines, such as those offered by Qualidata, by substituting general
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Saunders et al. 625
terms, e.g. Jaspal’s job as a theatre director became ‘job in the Arts’. However, sometimes
such vagueness was incompatible with conveying key parts of a story. For example, Sandra,
whose daughter has been in PVS for many years, describes the ‘tipping point’ for her,
which triggered a discussion about how her daughter might be allowed to die:
Extract 4
I’m a beauty therapist by trade so I looked after her hands and toenails. And on this occasion
one of the nursing staff […], decided her nails were a bit long and had cut them and in one case
had gone across the quick and it had bled. And it had really upset me because I know how much
that hurts. And anyway, [X] came in and she said ‘You look really rough’. And I said ‘You
know, there are times, [X], when I just wish she would go to sleep and never wake up’. And she
said ‘Well if that’s what you truly, truly want, it can be achieved’. And I sort of looked at her
and said ‘Oh yes? And how?’ And she said ‘Seriously. There is a process.’ […] So after she’d
gone, I actually sat down and thought about it, consulted with my [other family members] who
basically said ‘Oh, thank god!’
Sandra isolates a precise moment which, for her, encapsulated her daughter’s suffering
and her own inability to protect her; it is through the lens of her professional experience
that this moment gains its significance. Anonymising Sandra’s occupation would under-
mine her description of this important moment, and therefore risk not fully representing
Sandra’s experiences.
Family relationships
The familial relationship between the interviewee and the severely brain injured patient
is usually highly significant for the interviewee (e.g. ‘As his mother I know …’ or
‘Speaking as her husband …’). Wherever possible we retained the family relationship in
our published accounts – but we sometimes felt it necessary to disguise them. We have,
for example, usually not identified gay relationships as such and we have subsumed
categories such as ‘step-parent’ or ‘adopted child’ under the category ‘parent/child’ to
avoid identification. We recognise the problems associated with this. In particular, the
attempt to achieve anonymity structurally predisposes researchers toward the erasure of
the experiences of minorities – precisely because their minority status may make these
research participants easy to identify as, for example, the only known lesbian with breast
cancer in a medical practice (Kaiser, 2009) or one of very few black faculty members
(Baez, 2002). The result is a one-dimensional view which obscures family diversity.
With regret, we pursued this strategy nonetheless, except when the particular nature of
the minority relationship was essential to our analysis (e.g. if an interviewee compared
being in the role of ‘step-parent’ versus ‘his “real” mother’, or an interviewee com-
mented on discrimination encountered as a gay partner).
When publishing extracts that reveal potentially identifying minority or atypical rela-
tionships we have made sure that such extracts are presented in isolation from other data
from the same person and/or discussed with interviewees the issues involved and arrived
at a negotiated decision about how to use the data. One such example comes from the
interview with Louisa, whose two teenage sons, Nicholas and Dylan, were involved in
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626 Qualitative Research 15(5)
an accident which left Dylan with relatively minor injuries, but Nicholas in a vegetative
state. The anonymisation challenge here centred on the fact that Louisa’s sons were iden-
tical twins. The likelihood of there being more than one mother in the UK with identical
twins, one in PVS, is small. We initially decided that it would be easy enough to substi-
tute any reference to ‘twin’ with ‘brother’. This proved problematic, however, when
faced with extracts such as the following:
Extract 5
Interviewer: Did you have a sense of where was Nicholas’ soul or spirit … through
all this?
Louisa: Yes. I think I know where it is.
Int: Where?
Louisa: That photograph is absolutely Nicholas [pointing to photograph of
Nicholas before his accident]. And I think Nicholas’ soul is settled
with his brother. I’ve got a photograph on my iPad where Dylan
looks like the 23-year-old version of that. Now I mean you would
think ‘Well of course he would, you silly woman! They’re identical
twins!’. But I could always tell who was who because of the way
they held their faces. Because Dylan’s view of the world was differ-
ent to Nicholas’, so they always had slightly different expressions
… And that became more apparent as they grew up. But this picture
that I’ve got of Dylan the day he graduated, he looks like his bro.
And I can’t help thinking that because they were identical twins
[…]. I just wonder if Nicholas is now just living out his destiny
through his brother’s life. […] So I suspect that maybe that spirit
that split in the early part of [date of accident] has now merged
again. I hope so. I hope so.
As with Extracts 2–4, this part of the interview gives important insights into how an inter-
viewee thinks about life–death issues in relation to a severely brain injured relative. It could
not have been included in our analysis if we had not retained ‘twins’. Towards the end of
the interview, the interviewer asked Louisa for her input on our anonymising strategy:
Extract 6
I’m not really too worried about whether people hook up on the fact that it’s us or not […]
There aren’t too many families who [have these unique traits] so frankly, if anybody’s remotely
interested, they’ll realise it was the Herwell family. […] Just take your normal steps [to
anonymise the interview], but don’t worry.
This kind of researcher–participant collaboration on an individualised basis has been
suggested by others (e.g. see Grinyer, 2002; Kaiser, 2009; Svalastog and Eriksson, 2010)
but none have raised the possibility of discussing these issues during the interview itself,
as was done here – this strategy does, however, rely on the interviewer to recognise chal-
lenges to anonymity as the interview progresses.
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Saunders et al. 627
Other potentially identifying issues
Over and above name, place, occupation and religion there are often features in any
dataset, which may provide unique (or closely narrowing) identifying information. We
have given examples of a range of such features throughout the discussion above –
including idiosyncratic details of a case. Depending on the substantive focus of the
research there may also be a recurring issue that needs special attention. In our case
this was the nature of the original injury. Such information was often interwoven
throughout accounts and also has prognostic significance. Brain damage resulting
from ‘non-traumatic’ injury (e.g. from oxygen deprivation following cardiac arrest) is
more predictably devastating that that resulting from traumatic brain injury (e.g. from
a blow to the head). Distinguishing between these types of injury is therefore analyti-
cally important. However, beyond this we commonly used generic phrases such as
‘road traffic accident’ or ‘sporting injury’, which allowed us to describe a range of
events while not revealing more specific information.
So far, so straightforward. However, sometimes the cause of the injury had a greater
significance to the interviewee and was infused throughout the account. For instance,
precipitating events, such as domestic violence or a cardiac arrest brought on by anorexia
could be hard to simply evacuate from an interviewee’s story. There may be times that
unpicking such elements in the narrative would be core to the analysis, and therefore jus-
tifiably retained in published reports, as long as the participant was assured of being kept
anonymous as far as this is possible. Suppose, for example, that an interviewee told us that
it was horrific to consider withdrawing artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH) from her
PVS daughter because that daughter had suffered from anorexia and the whole relation-
ship between mother and daughter was embedded in this very fraught relationship with
food. Further suppose that this case had come to court, and a transcript was available on
the internet referring to the daughter’s anorexia. This is sufficiently unusual (in fact there
is no such case!) that it would identify not only the mother and daughter but also other
members of the family and any health professionals mentioned in the interview. In
anonymising this interview we might perhaps change the daughter’s illness from anorexia
to oesophageal cancer – another illness (albeit physical rather than psychological) causing
problems in eating which might therefore similarly affect how the mother felt about ANH
withdrawal. If we think that disguise may be too transparent, the daughter may become a
son, and/or the mother transformed into a sister, and we would use different pseudonyms
for different extracts to minimise the chance of jigsaw identification.
Conclusion
We have shown that anonymising is not, in practice, something that can be done on auto-
matic pilot with a ‘one size fits all’ or ‘find and replace’ approach, and have highlighted
some of the challenges we faced in one particular dataset. For us, anonymising has been
an ongoing working compromise: at times we have sacrificed some of the integrity of the
data in order to maximise anonymity and at other times we may have risked compromis-
ing anonymity in order to maintain the integrity of the data. The process of anonymising
transcripts has involved multiple meetings and lengthy email exchanges between the
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628 Qualitative Research 15(5)
three authors of this paper: it has been very much a team effort, with not all of us agree-
ing all of the time. We share the process in the hope it can help others debate the issues
and try to come to the ‘best possible’, or ‘least worst’, option for their own data.
We would like to conclude by highlighting the implications of this discussion for the
design and conduct of research more broadly. First, our work highlights some of the con-
siderations that might help to maximise ‘informed consent’ via the design of consent
forms, information for participants and dialogue during the research process. Our consent
form (approved by both universities’ ethics committees) included from the outset a range
of permissions, from giving consent for only the project team to access the data through
to archiving via Qualidata. This evolved over the course of the study as we expanded the
range of ways in which we aimed to use the data and wanted to alert participants to this
and to give them a more nuanced set of options from which they could opt in or out. For
example, as we were increasingly invited to talk at medical ethics conferences we started
to highlight the fact that the likely audience for participant data would include treating
clinicians, and possibly the very clinicians who were currently, had previously, or might
in future, treat the interviewee’s relative (a point also explored by Kaiser, 2009). In addi-
tion, during the course of the project, we became more skilled at detecting, during the
course of an interview, possible problems with anonymising what interviewees were say-
ing, and were able to raise it with participants there and then (as shown in Extract 6). In
other cases we contacted a participant subsequently to discuss particular concerns.
Experience also taught us that we needed to alert participants to the possibility of future,
currently unanticipated, risks to their anonymity. If, for example, after giving us permis-
sion to use their interview in our research, they were subsequently to use the same vivid
descriptions in (for example) a court case or on their blog, this could allow readers to
make a connection. This too is something we now explicitly include in our information
sheet for participants.
Our research also has implications for data sharing and archiving. To manage data shar-
ing we followed a two-stage process: first a crude anonymisation of whole transcripts so
that we could enter them into the data management system to share with our research
group, and then anonymising individual data extracts at the point of submission for publi-
cation, leaving in only details essential to the point being made, and creating a smoke
screen where necessary (e.g. gender change). Even the first level of anonymising was
extremely time-consuming – and therefore has resource implications for the funding of
data sharing. The first author (as research associate) anonymised names of people and
places and any other obvious identifiers, but left in information which was either difficult
to extract because it infused the whole interview, or which was essential for the analysis.
More than a month’s labour was devoted to anonymising just 20 of the interviews (three
week’s full-time from the first author with additional input from the two co-authors) and
we ran out of resources to anonymise all the data we had permission to share. Costing this
into future funding proposals needs to recognise the time commitment involved. As we
worked on anonymising transcripts it also became increasingly apparent how much would
be lost if we created maximum protection for our participants and how difficult it would be
to make full transcripts completely anonymous for use by other researchers in an academic
archive. In collaborating with colleagues from different disciplines we have become
acutely aware that there are different assumptions across disciplines about what constitutes
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Saunders et al. 629
appropriate anonymisation and varying levels of experience in handling sensitive empirical
data. It is difficult for colleagues detached from the original data collection context, and
without in-depth knowledge of the field, to judge what may, or may not pose an identifica-
tion risk. If we archive the interviews after we have finished working with them and permit
their use by other researchers, we will have to do another round of anonymising and pro-
ceed with great care as our ongoing oversight of anonymity issues in relation to our dataset
has been an essential part of our current work with our co-authors.
Finally, we have to admit that, even with all our efforts, anonymity cannot be com-
pletely guaranteed. It can be subverted from different directions, not least because of the
major challenges to anonymity linked to the rapid changes we are seeing in the data
available on the world wide web, and associated practices (see Saunders et al., 2014;
Tilley and Woodthorpe, 2011). Particular challenges are posed especially through the
increasing use of social media (both by research participants and researchers) and open
access publishing of academic work (a condition of some funding) and increasing efforts
at public engagement from academia (e.g. via impact activities). For example, our latest
work involves developing a ‘healthtalkonline.org’ website for families and clinicians –
where they can learn about families’ experiences from the research, and hear actual
audio, or view vivid extracts of film, from interviews with some individuals. This initia-
tive is funded by an ESRC ‘Knowledge Exchange’ grant, and is an invaluable addition to
the existing research and its outputs: ensuring the research findings are presented in an
accessible and engaging way that can support families in the future, be used in clinical
training to improve practice and, perhaps, impact on policy. However, inevitably such
initiatives raise new challenges for how to negotiate anonymity (or its suspension) with
family members who chose to appear on film (even if they do so with pseudonyms). In
such cases the sort of careful thought that goes into anonymising practices outlined in
this article is useful groundwork for considering how to manage deliberate suspensions
of anonymity (e.g. through the use of voice recordings or actual film of the individual on
the site). Explicit negotiation with research participants is also inevitably an essential
part of the process (e.g. participants sign off on how they wish to be described in a mini
biography on the site as well as being offered view of their transcripts or copy of the
film). New practices also have to be used under certain circumstances; for instance, in
one case a participant was happy to have her voice used, but not her image, and requested
that her voice be disguised a little on the recording.
Discussion between researchers and research participants thus becomes an essential
part of negotiating levels of anonymising, or its suspension under particular circum-
stances – a process which is valuable, but time consuming, and again needs to be costed
into projects adopting such approaches. It also needs to be recognised that although
researchers have professional duties and training in relation to anonymity, research par-
ticipants may not, and sometimes research participants may take the initiative to disrupt
anonymity or adopt ‘identity management’ approaches in unexpected ways. As we were
writing this article, we were confronted with one such challenge: one of our research
participants was googling information about coma and came across our (open access)
article about brain injury which drew on our, oh so carefully and fully anonymised, inter-
view data (Kitzinger J and Kitzinger C, 2013). He cheerfully emailed to inform us that
he had worked out his own pseudonym, and linked the article to his Facebook page. This,
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630 Qualitative Research 15(5)
to us, seemed an ironic twist, and one that almost typifies the difficulties in anonymising
our dataset. We no longer set the terms of engagement as researchers, and anonymising
is very much an evolving exercise that continues to throw up challenges and surprises –
and this is subject to further reflection in Saunders et al. (2014), which also reproduces a
revision we made to our consent form to manage similar situations in future.
Funding
This paper is part of the work of the multidisciplinary York-Cardiff ‘Chronic Disorders of
Consciousness’ (CDoC) Research Centre, and was part-funded by Research Priming Funds pro-
vided by the Wellcome Trust [ref: 097829/Z/11/A] through the Centre for Chronic Diseases and
Disorders (C2D2) at the University of York, which funded the employment of the first author as a
Research Assistant at the University of York.
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Author biographies
Benjamin Saunders is a discourse analyst working in health services research. Having completed
his PhD at Cardiff University in 2012 investigating young adults’ experiences of chronic illness,
and subsequently publishing in this area, he then held a research post in the interdisciplinary York-
Cardiff Chronic Disorders of Consciousness Research Centre, working on projects concerned with
serious brain injury, ‘best interests’ and end-of-life decision making. His current role is as a
Research Associate at the Research Institute for Primary Care & Health Sciences at Keele
University, working on an NIHR funded project designing a stratified primary care intervention
for patients with musculoskeletal pain.
Jenny Kitzinger trained in social anthropology and is Professor of Communications research at
Cardiff University. Her varied research career has spanned the representation of AIDS, child sex-
ual abuse, and cancer and ethical debates about stem cell research, GM crops and nanotechnology.
As co-director of the interdisciplinary Cardiff-York Chronic Disorders of Consciousness Research
Centre she is currently working on a range of projects concerned with serious brain injury, ‘best
interests’ and end-of-life decision making.
Celia Kitzinger is a social psychologist and Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University
of York. Her varied research career has spanned lesbian identities, discourses of same-sex marriage,
counselling interactions with women experiencing trauma after childbirth, and basic structures of
human interaction (conversation analysis). As co-director of the interdisciplinary York-Cardiff
Chronic Disorders of Consciousness Research Centre she is currently working on a range of projects
concerned with serious brain injury, ‘best interests’ and end-of-life decision making.
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