Author
Listed:
- Norman Adamson Sigalla King
- Newton Kyando
- Lucy Massoi
AbstractThe importance of confidentiality cannot be understated in conducting research, particularly when using interviews and questionnaires as main instruments of data collection. Trainers and lecturers, the world over, advocate on the importance of preserving secrecy of the respondents. This article reviews the essence of confidentiality, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of confidentiality. The study is explorative in nature, and utilises experiential as the main source of data gathering. We conclude that while confidentiality has been seen as important in researches, there are possibilities that confidentiality may hamper the true position of the research, and in addition, it creates possibility for research cheating since respondents cannot, in essence, be verified. We therefore appeal for the contemporary world scientist to look on revealing the names of respondents for ascertaining reliability and validity of the information gathered. In addition, with modern tools of data analysis and interpretation, there are possibilities of manipulating information of previous studies without doing a fieldwork, because one may be protected by the poor use of some research ethics such as confidentiality. We appeal to research supervisors to do their work imitating what referees in games such as football would do when ensuring that every thing is observed in conformity to rules of the ground. Otherwise, we are likely to see research dissertations/thesis accepted and even published, as if goals accepted even when the entire audience notes that it was a clear hand used to insert the ball to the net.
Suggested Citation
Norman Adamson Sigalla King & Newton Kyando & Lucy Massoi, 2014.
"The Challenges of Confidentiality and Anonymity in Undertaking Scientific Research,"
International Journal of Social Science Research, Macrothink Institute, vol. 2(2), pages 47-54, September.
Handle:
RePEc:mth:ijssr8:v:2:y:2014:i:2:p:47-54
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mth:ijssr8:v:2:y:2014:i:2:p:47-54. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Technical Support Office (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/ijssr .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.