confidentiality

[Shanley E. M. Allen]

While true that blurring of faces and removal of names from videotapes (and
audiotapes for names) is possible, there are at least three problems:

1. it would be very time consuming
2. it would be very hard to get this exactly right (and thus even more time
consuming) with children moving so much on the screen and a lot of talk
going on (I'm thinking primarily of spontaneous speech in non-lab
situations here)
3. there is a definite possiblity that these alterations will change the
usefulness of the tapes for analysis

I think the first two are very important logistical problems, and we really
have to think about who's going to do all this work and where the money for
it will come from to do it.

However, I'm most interested in the third issue.  For example, what if I'm
trying to determine the relationship between eye gaze and use of
demonstratives.  Impossible if the faces are blurred.  And what if I'm
trying to study the phonological processes at morpheme boundaries.  I
potentially lose a lot of data in agglutinative languages where proper
names often have suffixes, since I can't hear the proper name and don't
know how it plays into the phonological form of the following morpheme.  So
I think one must also think of how the usefulness of the audio or video
material is changed if alterations are made to protect confidentiality.
For lots of types of research these changes won't matter, but for others
they'll be quite important.

Just one more aspect of this issue to think about.

Shanley Allen.

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Shanley E. M. Allen, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Boston University
Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics
Developmental Studies Department, School of Education
605 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA, 02215, U.S.A.
phone: +1-617-358-0354
fax: +1-617-353-3924
e-mail: shanley at bu.edu
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