Security and anonymity of qualitative data in a digital age: the experiences of ethnographic gang researchers, and thoughts on the feasibility maintaining anonymity in digital archive

This paper has two overlapping aims. The first is to describe some strategies we developed to improve the security of our digitally created and held qualitative data (involving interviews with gang members) after the theft of a laptop computer - containing highly sensitive data - from the home of a fieldworker. After a thorough review of our data security procedures, we found them to be lacking. We reflect in this paper on our experience of our recently completed ethnographic research Youth Gangs in an English City1. Our improved guidelines take into account what we refer to as the 'principle of proliferation': versions and copies of qualitative data held digitally proliferate quickly as a result of being held: in different forms (voice, text), in various physical locations (office, home, in the field), on different storage devices (voice recorders, laptops, desktops, memory sticks), by individuals with particular roles on a research team (managers, fieldworkers, interviewers, transcribers), and during different phases of the research (data collection, data analysis, data archive). The second aim of this paper is to contribute to the emerging literature on ethical issues related to the archive of qualitative data, again using the exemplar of our ethnographic gang research. We describe the characteristics of our interview data with gang members and others that limit the possibility of maintaining confidentiality for our research participants if these data were to be publicly archived, even when identifying names and places have been stripped away. We draw on some psychoanalytic literature where similar issues have been debated in relation to the publication of case study material. We argue that preparing and lodging data in a public archive should be seen as another phase of the research into which data security procedures for a research project should be extended. We propose an alternative to the public archive in instances where achieving anonymity in archived material is not possible.