I conduct academic research as an Associate Professor at the Marriott School of Business, Brigham Young University. I also conduct professional consulting research as the principal consultant and owner of DeRosia Consulting.
For both my academic research and my consulting research, I keep all information about the participants in my studies strictly confidential in accordance with the code of marketing research conduct for the Insights Association (formerly the Marketing Research Association).
My primary method of achieving strict confidentiality is a simple one: I do not collect personally identifying information such as name, telephone numbers, mailing addresses, or e-mail addresses. None of the recruiting methods I use allow the automatic collection of such information, and I do not request such information from participants in my studies. I do collect personal information that describes the general location of participants (including information such as state of residence and zip code). However, I do not collect information that could allow myself (or another party) to identify or contact respondents.
There is one very rare exception to this strict privacy policy. A few of my studies have included a “prize” that is awarded to a participant in the study. Depending on the purposes of the research, this “prize” may be awarded by random selection or by best performance on some research-oriented task. In these studies, the “prize” is fully disclosed. (Indeed, such a “prize” is conspicuously highlighted as an integral part of the study.) Such studies amount to an exception to my privacy policy because I sometimes need to collect personally identifying information to award the prize. (For example, the prize for one study involved mailing an item to the winner.) In these rare cases, personally identifying information is collected on a strictly voluntarily basis, and this information is kept confidential.
I sometimes conduct research using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. As part of the Mechanical Turk process, Amazon makes visible the “Worker ID” to a requester. However, this is limited to workers who have completed one of the requester’s HITs in the past. It should be noted that the “Worker ID” is not identifying information. That is, it would be identifying information for the friendly folks at Amazon (because they could link the “Worker ID” to a name, e-mail address, and so on). However, to a requester the “Worker ID” is a seemingly random number with no links to any further information. Amazon has an established process for requesters like me to “Contact a Worker.” However, this process is anonymous to me. That is, I do not see a worker’s identifying information (e.g., an e-mail address); I only see the “Worker ID.” It is my understanding that with Amazon’s “Contact a Worker” process, Amazon attempts to send the requester’s message to the worker via e-mail. (I’m not sure why Amazon has chosen to it that way, but Amazon does what Amazon wants to do.) It should be noted that if a worker sends me an e-mail (which all workers are welcome to do, either directly at ederosia@byu.edu or by replying to the e-mail that is generated by Amazon’s “Contact a Worker” process), the anonymity of Amazon’s process has been circumvented by the worker. In such a case, I maintain my privacy policy by keeping all such communications confidential.
– Eric DeRosia