Answered Essay: Explain how researchers can address individuals' right to privacy.

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Privacy is the control over the extent, timing, and circumstances of sharing oneself (physically, behaviorally, or intellectually) with others. Private Information means individually identifiable information about behavior, which has been provided for specific purposes by an individual and which the individual can reasonably expect will not be made public (for example, a medical record). This may also include sensitive information like Sexual attitudes, preferences or practices, use of alcohol, drugs or other addictive products etc.

Dominant approach is, arguably, the most common approach to protecting respondent confidentiality in sociology. Under the dominant approach, if data cannot be collected anonymously, i.e., without any identifying information, researchers must collect, analyze and report data without compromising the identities of their respondents.

The issue of privacy can be addressed during data collection, data cleaning, and dissemination:

First, issues of privacy and confidentiality are addressed at the time of data collection. At this point, sociologists make assurances of confidentiality, typically via consent form statements such as, “All identifying characteristics, such as occupation, city, and ethnic background, will be changed.”

Second, privacy and confidentiality is addressed during data cleaning. Researchers remove identifiers to create a “clean” data set. A clean data set does not contain information that identifies respondents, such as a name or address (such identifying information might be stored elsewhere, in separate, protected files). Some identifiers are easily recognized and dealt with. For example, the names of respondents can be replaced with pseudonyms. Addresses can be deleted from the file once they are no longer needed. However, for both quantitative and qualitative data sets, unique combinations of traits can be used to identify respondents.

The Alternative Approach is also used for maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of private information. The alternative approach provides practical guidelines to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the use of detailed data that might lead to deductive disclosure. The alternative approach addresses the privacy issues by 1) making respondents better informed of the use of data (i.e., who is the audience for the study results and how will the study results be disseminated), and 2) by instituting practical steps to facilitate dialogue with respondents about how their data can be used (i.e., revising the informed consent process).