ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 provides a methodological fork in the road. By now, core ethical principles have emerged that can be translated as respect for persons, beneficence and non-maleficence, all outlined in the 1979 Belmont Report. These principles are fundamental but they are not rote-learned; instead, they emerge organically out of the students’ analyses of cases. These learnings are applied to new puzzles, asking how easily a research participant can withdraw their data from a survey compared to research using interviews. This exposes an epistemological wedge between qualitative and quantitative research ethics, especially in the terms “anonymity” and “confidentiality” used by quantitative and qualitative researchers respectively. Exercises reveal that once survey data is collected, both the respondent’s identity and what they said are unknown, making this anonymous. However, the qualitative researcher always knows the identity of their participants and what they said. What they say cannot be unknown. Data can be de-identified. But de-identified data are never anonymous.
