What does giving voice to research participants mean when the norm is to offer them confidentiality and anonymity? To what extent do we have a responsibility to reveal their reported views, offered to us, to the wider audiences our studies aim to reach?

The last couple of decades has seen both thinking and empirical work about pupil voice – and pupils may well be research participants in educational research. The work of Michael Fielding (1)(2) in (3) and Groundwater-Smith and Mockler (4) in particular encourages teachers and academics committed to realising pupil voice to develop pupils as researchers to agenda set and co-construct knowledge . Fielding (2) and others eg. SOUNDOUT (5) relate this to a model of pupil participation originally offered by Arnstein and adapted by Hart. This work can be seen to have an ethical basis; the giving of voice, the empowering of pupils not only to have their voice included in research but, if given equity in power within schools, to drive research. This is one way of showing respect to pupils not merely as subjects of educational research but also as potential ‘agents of change’ (2). One current study by Angele Pulis is exploring the potential for students to drive school improvement through acting as assessors of quality in Maltese settings (6).

Teacher voice is something less easy to find directly addressed in empirical research literature, although there are examples eg. A recent Australian study of professional development which gave equal voice to Pre-and In-service teachers (7) and a growing interest in marginalised voices such as male primary school teachers (8) (9) and those in non-uk contexts (10).

So, returning to how should such voices be reported?

  • Does this mean that participant voices should be quoted directly as much as possible in written and oral reporting?
  • Should these extracts of verbatim text be offered to the public named or unnamed?
  • How do we balance participants’ rights to their intellectual property in terms of their data given to a project against their right to privacy (as anonymity)?
  • Offering the choice to some in a project to be named and others to remain anonymous isn’t a solution as naming some is likely to reveal the anonymity not only of other participants but also the institution?
  • This is also a dilemma for practitioner researchers. However much they commit to anonymising the organisation in which they work when reporting, as both a direct and indirect mechanism to protect the identities of participants, when their name as the author is on the cover, isn’t it now too easy to find their employment as part of an individual’s digital footprint?
  • We need to revisit why we offer anonymity – honestly? To what extent is offering anonymity for our benefit as researchers – to gain what is often considered more ‘honest’ data for the purposes of addressing our research aims – rather than for the participants’ benefit to protect their identity and any local implications of what they offer to the study (and is reported) in our research?
  • If we want our studies to be emancipatory then shouldn’t we be offering our research as a place to allow participants to voice their views more openly (especially when this is openly challenging)? However, can we offer our research as a safe space? Can we defend the participants’ rights to be heard?
  • If we adopt this open research approached are we likely only to include those who are ‘up for this’ and therefore exclude those who prefer to be less openly confrontational (and yet would want to offer their views for the greater good)
  • This seems to me to have parallels with the debate people find themselves having with themselves in terms of whether and how to use social media. How private or how public should we be with our views? How do we (or do we) want to be heard?
  • I conclude by pointing to a brave piece of collaborative research where all participants name themselves, evidently feeling safe to do so (11).

Web references 

(1) http://www.edugains.ca/resourcesSV/StudentVoiceResearch/StudentsasRadicalPartnersofChange.pdf

(2) http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00002544.doc

(3) http://www.pearsonpublishing.co.uk/education/catalogue/49847X.html

(4) Groundwater-Smith, S. And Mockler, N. (2016) From data source to co-researchers? Tracing the shift from ‘student voice’ to student-teacher partnerships in Educational Action Research, Educational Axtion Research, 24 (2): 159-176.

(5) https://soundout.org/ladder-of-student-involvement/

(6) https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/pupil-voice-in-quality-assurance-of-school

(7) Simpson, A. (2016) Dialogic teaching in the initial teacher education classroom: “Everyone’s voice will be heard”, Research Papers in Education, 31 (3), 89-106.

(8) Trent, J. (2015) The gendered, hierarchical construction of teacher identities: exploring the male primary school teacher voice in Hong Kong, Journal of Educational Policy, 30 (4), 500-517.

(9) Bosworth, J. (2016) What factors can influence male trainee teachers’ successful completion of a Primary PGCE course? presentation at TEAN annual conference, May 5-6th 2016.

(10) Samuel, M. (2014) South African teacher voices: recurring resistances and reconstructions for teacher education and development, Journal of Education for Teaching, 40 (5), 610-621.

(11) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Researching-Schools-Schools-University-Partnership-Educational/dp/B017AJXOQA/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1462623614&sr=8-5&keywords=School+university++McLaughlin