The Ethical Dilemmas and Social Scientific Trade-offs of Masking in Ethnography

Abstract

Masking, the practice of hiding or distorting identifying information about people, places, and organizations, is usually considered a requisite feature of ethnographic research and writing. This is justified both as an ethical obligation to one’s subjects and as a scientifically neutral position (as readers are enjoined to treat a case’s idiosyncrasies as sociologically insignificant). We question both justifications, highlighting potential ethical dilemmas and obstacles to constructing cumulative social science that can arise through masking. Regarding ethics, we show, on the one hand, how masking may give subjects a false sense of security because it implies a promise of confidentiality that it often cannot guarantee and, on the other hand, how naming may sometimes be what subjects want and expect. Regarding scientific tradeoffs, we argue that masking can reify ethnographic authority, exaggerate the universality of the case (e.g., “Middletown”), and inhibit replicability (or “revisits”) and sociological comparison. While some degree of masking is ethically and practically warranted in many cases and the value of disclosure varies across ethnographies, we conclude that masking should no longer be the default option that ethnographers unquestioningly choose.

Transparency and Unmasking Issues in Ethnographic Crime Research: Methodological Considerations

“…Generations of ethnographers have used regional or city pseudonyms in order to create abstractions that could be applied across time and space. Like Reyes (2017) and Jerolmack and Murphy (2017), I believe that this is a problem. For instance, how can one disguise a city as "Southern City," when southern cities such as Atlanta, Memphis, and Columbia differ in their culture and ethnoracial makeup?…”

“…Yet I believe that partial disclosure can be done safely to expand our knowledge. As Jerolmack and Murphy () state, complete masking handcuffs readers and weakens an analysis (see also Guenther ). For instance, in masking a participant, an ethnographer may intentionally or unintentionally omit biographical details that could have stimulated critique or complicated an explanation.…”

The Future of Sociology Depends on Open Science

“…Alternatively, you might reconsider whether you really need to anonymize. When you ask participants for informed consent, in some cases you can ask permission to share details about their lives publicly and avoid the problems of anonymization (Jerolmack and Murphy 2019).…”

A mixed-methods framework for analyzing text data: Integrating computational techniques with qualitative methods in demography

“…Access to confidential data has long been a point of contention in qualitative research, particularly for interview and ethnographic studies (Duneier 1999;Jerolmack and Murphy 2017). Without access to data, researchers cannot independently evaluate claims made from the data, and so, critics contend, the scope for bias and misrepresentation becomes unacceptably large.…”

“…While these concerns about privacy are themselves the subject of intense debate (Duneier 1999;Jerolmack and Murphy 2017), automated text analysis may be able to provide at least some measure of transparency, even for highly sensitive data. By making the results of topic models publicly available, researchers may be able to share the basic structure of text data -broader trends and topical content -without sacrificing anonymity.…”