Protecting participant privacy while maintaining content and context: Challenges in qualitative data De‐identification and sharing

Abstract

The Library Assessment for Research and Scholarship Lab investigates qualitative research support across disciplines. In 2018–2019, the lab conducted 29 interviews with faculty, librarians, and doctoral students who engaged in qualitative research to understand their needs during the research lifecycle. At the conclusion of this project, the qualitative data will be deposited in a repository where it can be made available for future secondary use. The deposited data will include de‐identified versions of the complete interview transcripts. This poster supplements existing de‐identification standards, details drafting and revising protocol for de‐identification of our data, and discusses the de‐identification process we used for the qualitative data. Existing de‐identification literature and standards are limited and not widely uniform in qualitative research. In developing de‐identification protocol, our lab recognized several potential challenges in the process and created procedures to ensure future data usability. There is inherent tension between keeping privacy intact and sharing undistorted qualitative data. We aim to address some of the hazards with de‐identification best practices, demonstrating methodology for producing high quality de‐identified qualitative data. In offering up a test case with suggested methods to better protect participants’ identities, this work will lend itself to sustainable qualitative data sharing and reuse.