I also visited the Edgewater Cancer Center, a patient support center in a small city where local physicians refer patients for free emotional support and access to a library of cancer information. 1 I started the project in 2003 by making phone calls to oncology centers and physicians, hoping to gain access to their breast cancer patients. Data for my dissertation came from in-depth interviews I conducted with women who had recently completed treatment for breast cancer.
My dissertation examines how women who have undergone treatment for breast cancer perceive the identity of cancer survivor and how cultural notions of survivorship affect their adjustment to breast cancer ( Kaiser, 2006 2008). My concern with respondent confidentiality began during my dissertation research ( Kaiser, 2006). I then discuss the standard approaches to dealing with respondent confidentiality and an alternative approach. I begin with an example from my own research on breast cancer survivors to illustrate the confidentiality dilemmas faced by qualitative researchers. I address this gap in the literature by taking a practical approach to dealing with confidentiality concerns.
However, the literature on research design, research ethics, and the American Sociological Association (ASA) Code of Ethics say little about how to handle the risk of deductive disclosure when presenting detailed qualitative data ( Tolich, 2004). The theoretical foundations of current confidentiality practices have been discussed elsewhere ( Baez, 2002). In this article, I argue for addressing deductive disclosure through considerations of the audience of one’s research and through a re-envisioned informed consent process. Fisher Folk heightened researchers’ awareness of how we describe our study participants in our published work and how easy it might be to identify specific people in research reports. Breaches in confidentiality such as those in Fisher Folk also shatter the researcher-subject relationship and can damage the public’s trust in researchers ( Allen, 1997). Relationships in the community were strained because of what Ellis had written and the members of the community felt betrayed and humiliated by Ellis ( Ellis, 1995). The research participants identified themselves and their neighbors in the book even though their real names had not been used. Ellis’s data came from a small, remote community.
One of the most famous cases of deductive disclosure involves Carolyn Ellis’s ethnographic research in the book Fisher Folk (1986). As such, qualitative researchers face a conflict between conveying detailed, accurate accounts of the social world and protecting the identities of the individuals who participated in their research. Given that qualitative studies often contain rich descriptions of study participants, confidentiality breaches via deductive disclosure are of particular concern to qualitative researchers. For example, if a researcher studying teachers named the school district where the research occurred, someone with knowledge of the school district could likely identify individual teachers based on traits such as age, gender, and number of years with the school district ( Sieber, 1992).
Deductive disclosure, also known as internal confidentiality ( Tolich, 2004), occurs when the traits of individuals or groups make them identifiable in research reports ( Sieber, 1992).