How to Bring Your Work to Life with Participants’ Stories
0 What To Do About Confidentiality
Always be careful to honor your participants’ privacy. When collecting stories, tell them what you need the story for and ask for their permission to use it. The more details your story contains that make it feel real, the more effective it will be, but you may need to make compromises to protect participants’ privacy:
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- Make sure they know they can say “No”: Before starting to gather information for the story, make sure the person knows that it is okay to choose not to answer a question or not to reveal a detail. If the person you are interviewing is not comfortable giving you enough of the details you need, you will have to look elsewhere for your story, but hopefully you will be able to craft a good story with the details the person is comfortable providing.
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- Change the name and identifying details: A story always feels more real if it includes a name and details like where the person lives, her age, her job, etc. Instead of avoiding these details to protect your participant’s privacy, fictionalize them in a way that still fits the story. For example, you can change the young mother’s name, age, and town, but keep her in her high school years.
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- Create a composite story: If changing the participant’s name and details is not enough to protect privacy, you can collect several stories and create a single composite that mixes elements from all of them. When you use your story, be transparent in saying it is a composite.
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- Create a fictitious “typical” story: You may need to talk with a staff person instead of a participant, and work with them to create a “typical” story that incorporates common experiences among your participants without actually being about any of them specifically. When you use your story, be transparent in saying it is crafted from typical participant experiences described by a staff person working with the participants.
Stay tuned for the next Flight Log on how to present your participants in ways that truly honor them and your work with them.
