In dem Artikel „Curating the Ethnographic Moment” (Asher & Jahnke, 2013) geht es um Herausforderungen und Praktiken des Forschungsdatenmanagements in Bezug auf Ethik, das Einholen informierter Einwilligungen und Anonymisierungs- sowie Pseudonymisierungsstrategien. Es wurden Forschende zu ihren Erfahrungen befragt. Ein Soziologe beschreibt folgendes Dilemma:

“I wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging.” (2-13-111411).

(Asher & Jahnke, 2013)

Dieser Auszug enthält einen Hinweis zum Forschungsort Zentral-Pennsylvania. Eine Leserin des Artikels hinterlässt diesbezüglich folgenden Kommentar auf der Webseite:

„I am finding this article to be extremely useful and interesting. However, I noticed this “I wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania]” and I think you should remove the geographic reference. There can’t be that many priests in central Penn. and marriage certificates are public records. By including this geography in your article, you may yourself be compromising the privacy of the potential respondents”.

http://www.archivejournal.net/essays/curating-the-ethnographic-moment/

Die Autor*innen rechtfertigen sich wie folgt:

„Your point is well taken. We chose to replace a specific geographic reference (in this case a town) with the more general and nonspecific “central Pennsylvania” in order to retain contextual information while expanding the population of potential people to a large enough degree to make identification difficult. Since “central Pennsylvania” can be used to refer to almost anywhere between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, it would take a very committed person to compile a list of priests and cross reference it with marriage records–both very difficult tasks, especially since the person in question could have been married anywhere. However, as an added precaution, we have also omitted information about when the researcher was conducting this work and denomination of the priest the researcher was discussing, which further expands the population that would have to be investigated. We therefore believe the risk of identification is very low, but you are correct in noting that researchers and archivists need to be aware that seemingly innocuous details can result in breeches of confidentiality.“

(Asher & Jahnke, 2013)