Confidentiality

Public Versus Private Information

At one extreme, much information on identifiable individuals is public. In the United States, for instance, administrative records on public school teachers are collected and maintained by state education agencies. That information—on teacher identity, teaching or administrative assignments, and other data—is, at times, publicly accessible on state data systems websites and is used in education research. In such records, and in other public systems on parole officers or nurses or others employed by government, salaries and other information on individuals are disclosed.

At the other extreme, law and regulation can restrict access to information and, in doing so, actualize an assurance of confidentiality. For example, records on students in education institutions, whether the institutions are public or private, are covered in the United States by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Such records cannot be disclosed to anyone who is not associated with the school unless certain conditions are met. One such condition involves asking the students to agree in advance to the disclosure of their records for research purposes, as is the case for some massive online open-access course data systems.

Between these two extremes, there is considerable variation in the factors that influence, or are influenced by, assurances of confidentiality. The World Wide Web, generally, and social media initiatives, in particular, engender far more complicated issues.

Professional Codes of Ethics and Confidentiality

[Page 363]Many professional associations have developed codes of ethics that attend to confidentiality in the context of educational and social research. Section 12 of the American Educational Research Association Code of Ethics published in 2011, for instance, considers the topic in detail. Among other things, it tells its members that “confidential information is protected,” that “educational researchers take reasonable precautions to protect the confidentiality of information related to research participants… . (and) do not allow information gained in confidence to be used in ways would unfairly compromise research participants, students, employees, clients, or others” (p. 149). Other organizations that have addressed confidentiality issues, and to which education research is at times relevant, include the American Psychological Association, American Criminological Society, and American Sociological Association.

...