Anthropological ethics and the responsibilities of the anthropologist (Paper 1 Section B) practice questions.

An anthropologist takes a job in a call centre for eight months without telling the company or her colleagues that she is gathering material, and publishes an account of the workplace afterwards. Which principle of the American Anthropological Association's 2012 statement of professional responsibility does the design breach most directly?

• Be open and honest about the purpose of the work with everyone it involves
• Make the results of research accessible to the communities that were studied
• Protect and preserve the records generated in the course of the research
• Maintain respectful and ethical professional relationships with students and colleagues

Answer: Be open and honest about the purpose of the work with everyone it involves

Concealment removes any possibility of consent, because the people involved never learn that research is happening at all. Openness is the condition the other principles rest on, which is why secret research has been ruled out since the 1971 Principles of Professional Responsibility.

A ministry offers to fund an anthropologist's study of a resettlement scheme on condition that the findings are delivered to the ministry alone and are never published. Accepting that condition would conflict with a rule adopted after the Project Camelot and Thailand disputes, which requires that

• research findings must be delivered to the funder before they are shown to anyone who took part
• anthropologists neither carry out secret research nor make secret reports to a sponsor
• government departments may not fund anthropological research of any kind
• fieldwork abroad requires the written approval of the host country's government

Answer: anthropologists neither carry out secret research nor make secret reports to a sponsor

The 1971 Principles of Professional Responsibility answered those two disputes by ruling out clandestine research and undisclosed reporting. People cannot weigh the risks of taking part if they cannot know who will read the results; government money as such is not the objection, concealment is.

From 2007 the United States Army embedded social scientists with combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan to gather local social information. The executive board of the American Anthropological Association rejected the programme mainly because

• the social scientists recruited to the programme had not been trained in the languages and regional history that long-term fieldwork normally requires
• the material collected was gathered too quickly to bear comparison with the results of a settled research project
• people questioned by a researcher arriving with armed troops cannot refuse freely, and what they say may be used to harm them
• programmes of this kind are paid for by a government, and anthropologists may not accept public money

Answer: people questioned by a researcher arriving with armed troops cannot refuse freely, and what they say may be used to harm them

The objection was structural rather than a complaint about competence: agreement given in the presence of armed force is not voluntary, confidentiality cannot be guaranteed, and the information can be turned against the people who supplied it.

A researcher gives everyone in her account a false name and calls the settlement Ridgeway, but the published text states that it is the only village with a tannery in a named district and describes the tanner's household in detail. The undertaking of anonymity fails here because

• false names may not be used in academic publication without the permission of the persons named
• an account that conceals the location of fieldwork cannot be checked by other researchers
• the detail supplied lets readers who know the district work out who is being described
• anonymity covers individuals only, so the location of fieldwork must always be given exactly

Answer: the detail supplied lets readers who know the district work out who is being described

Pseudonyms protect nobody once the surrounding detail narrows the field to one identifiable household. Anonymisation has to be judged against everything the finished text makes recoverable, not against the names alone.

During fieldwork a nurse tells an anthropologist, in private, why she left her previous post. The anthropologist repeats the story to another member of staff in conversation, although none of it is ever published. Which undertaking has been broken?

• Anonymity, because the nurse's identity became attached to a published account
• Confidentiality, because material disclosed in private was passed to a third party
• Informed consent, because the nurse was never told that research was taking place
• The duty to preserve records, because the conversation was not written down at the time

Answer: Confidentiality, because material disclosed in private was passed to a third party

Anonymity concerns whether a person can be identified in what is published; confidentiality concerns what the researcher does with what she is told, including inside the field. A breach can therefore happen in conversation, long before anything is written.

Six months into fieldwork a man who had agreed to take part asks the anthropologist not to use anything he said about a quarrel with his brother, although the notes are already written up. The response consistent with current professional codes is to

• keep the material but attribute it to an unnamed member of the community instead
• use the material, since the agreement to take part covered the whole period of fieldwork
• remove the material from the research, because agreement to take part can be withdrawn
• ask him to put the request in writing and continue to treat the material as usable until the letter arrives

Answer: remove the material from the research, because agreement to take part can be withdrawn

Consent in long fieldwork is a process rather than a signature, and people revise it as they see what the research is becoming. Anonymising the passage does not meet the request, because it was the use of the material that was refused.