Educational Research Methods
A site to support teaching and learning...
Using pseudonyms in reporting research
It is a common convention in reporting research to assign assumed names or pseudonyms to research participants (and often to people they talk about in the research) to use when writing up the study.
This is usually considered an important ethical safeguard, to prevent the identification of individuals who contributed to the research. Although anonymity is not always possible, and indeed not always desirable, the default assumption should be that research participants are wherever possible offered anonymity and assured that the data they provide will remain confidential.
In some forms of research, generally those drawing upon paradigmatic commitments associated with positivistic and nomothetic positions (EPR1), participants may simply be denoted as ‘A’ or ‘teacher 4’ etc.
However, in interpretive and idiographic research (ERP2), where the importance of the individual subjectivity of different people is an important consideration, it is usually considered best practice to use authentic (but false) names to reflect the status of a participant as a unique and idiosyncratic person..
This is a personal site of Keith S. Taber to support teaching of educational research methods.
(Dr Keith Taber is Professor of Science Education at the University of Cambridge.)
2015
