Anonymity of the alter's name that the participant adds/nominates via/using forms

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Is there a way to anonymise the alter’s name that the participant adds/nominates?
I noticed that, when using forms the participant (ego) can add/nominate a person (alter), there is an example field “What is the person’s nickname?” Will this nickname replace the name during the interview to guarantee/maximise (alter’s) anonymisation? or will the (actual) person’s name appear during the interview, and be gathered by the interviewer, but the nickname will be used after the interview (data analysis) to replace the person’s name to implement pseudonymisation?

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Hi @David

Great question! This is an active area of research, and I’m pleased to say we’ve recently been awarded some funding to develop a new feature in this area, specifically with regards to anonymisation within the interview/before data is transmitted. For the details of that, I will defer to the grant PI @bernieh on what he has planned.

In terms of the current functionality:

  • You can of course have any number of attributes attached to an alter. Interviewer will try to find a variable called “name” by convention to use when displaying nodes, in order to help the participant identify the node on subsequent screens. There is no built-in concept of “name” or “nickname” - the software just looks for a variable called “name” by default. You can operationalise that in the interviewer however you wish.
  • You can customise the node labelling behaviour using an advanced feature whereby you provide a small script which takes in the current network and returns whatever data you like. Using this you can concatenate two variables (firstname, lastname for instance), or you can create entirely abstract labels. I can provide details of this if you are interested.
  • In terms of how this manifests in the data after the interview, all attributes provided by the participant are stored as-is. Any anonymisation of identifiable information currently has to be done by the researcher after the interview as part of data cleaning/analysis. As mentioned, this is something we are looking to improve.

Hope this helps. Please let me know if you have additional questions.

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Thanks Josh! @David, I really appreciate the question. Indeed, anonymising names is something we are working on as part of a new recently-awarded ESRC grant (details to be announced on here after next week :wink:

We realised that especially in self reported circumstances, the inclusion of names could either undermine anonymity or make respondents wary.

We are exploring a few different options for how this behaviour should work. We would appreciate your input. What do you expect for a “write the name now; anonymise at interview end” feature?