When Transparency Collides with Confidentiality

Elżbieta M. Goździak reflects on the tensions between transparency, confidentiality, and trust in ethnographic research.

The Request

As our project on children with migration backgrounds in Polish schools enters its final phase, our team has begun receiving familiar requests from journals and research funders: Will the data be shared?

On its face, it seems like a reasonable request, straightforward and motivated by worthy goals—transparency and open science. But is it?

The Question

What exactly are journals and funders asking us to share?

The answer is not nearly as straightforward as it may seem. In ethnographic research, "the data" are not a single dataset but a collection of different materials gathered, created, and interpreted over the course of fieldwork.

Before discussing whether these materials can be shared, we first need to ask what they actually are.

The Material

What counts as data in an ethnographic project such as ours?

Over more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork, we generated interview recordings, transcripts, fieldnotes, field journal entries, notes from informal conversations and participant observations, translations, drawings, texts, voice messages, and many more. Is this all "data"?

Our materials cannot be presented and shared in a simple file or a speadsheet .....

Their meaning emerges from the connections between interviews, observations, fieldnotes, and the researcher's ongoing engagement in the field. They are a rich collection of conversations, observations, and reflections that derive their meaning from context. The school a child attends, the language spoken at home, the migration trajectory, the family composition, and the relationships we observed all contribute to ethnographic understanding. Even the tone of voice is important. Yet these same contextual details also make meaningful anonymization extraordinarily difficult. Removing names is often not enough. In ethnography, context itself can become identifying.

Our research materials are not a spreadsheet waiting to be uploaded into a repository.

The Promise

Trust is the foundation upon which ethnographic research is built.

In order to elicit data through interviews or informal conversations, our study participants had to provide consent (adults) or assent (children). This was not merely a stipulation of the Ethics Committee approval of our project, but part of our on-going committment to ethical research. During the consent process, we explained that audio recordings would be destroyed after they had been transcribed. Furthermore, we assured them that all the information they provided will be annonymized. We have asked stuidy participants what psedonyms they would like to use. As you can imagine, children had a lot of fun coming up with pseudonyms! Additionally, we assured participants that electronic files will be stored on encrypted laptops, in password protected files, and that only our research team members will have access to this material, nobody else!

The Risk

Transparency and confidentiality are not enemies, but they sometimes pull researchers in different directions.

Experienced ethnographers know that removing names rarely guarantees anonymity. Sometimes occupations, schools, migration histories, or unique family circumstances are enough to identify participants. Rich contextual information—the very material that allows us to understand people's lives—is often the same material that makes complete de-identification impossible.

The Responsibility

Protecting participants does not mean abandoning transparency. Rather, it means practicing transparency differently. Ethnographers demonstrate the quality of their research differently: through detailed descriptions of methods, careful documentation of fieldwork, reflexivity, analytical transparency, and thoughtful engagement with participants' words. Readers should be able to understand how we arrived at our interpretations even if they cannot access interview transcripts.

The Conversation

Open science has transformed research in many positive ways. It encourages transparency, collaboration, and public trust. Perhaps transparency need not look exactly the same across all disciplines. Ethnographic research invites us to ask whether openness can also mean honoring promises made to participants and safeguarding the relationships that make our work possible. Without trust, many ethnographic projects simply could not be conducted.