The Ethical Dilemmas and Social Scientific Trade-offs of Masking in Ethnography

TLDR

Masking is widely regarded as essential in ethnographic research, justified both as an ethical duty to protect subjects and as a means of maintaining scientific neutrality. This study challenges those justifications, examining how masking can create ethical dilemmas and hinder the development of cumulative social science. The authors find that masking can falsely assure confidentiality, reinforce ethnographic authority, exaggerate universality, and impede replicability, concluding that masking should no longer be the default practice.

Abstract

Masking, the practice of hiding or distorting identifying information about people, places, and organizations, is usually considered a requisite feature of ethnographic research and writing. This is justified both as an ethical obligation to one’s subjects and as a scientifically neutral position (as readers are enjoined to treat a case’s idiosyncrasies as sociologically insignificant). We question both justifications, highlighting potential ethical dilemmas and obstacles to constructing cumulative social science that can arise through masking. Regarding ethics, we show, on the one hand, how masking may give subjects a false sense of security because it implies a promise of confidentiality that it often cannot guarantee and, on the other hand, how naming may sometimes be what subjects want and expect. Regarding scientific tradeoffs, we argue that masking can reify ethnographic authority, exaggerate the universality of the case (e.g., “Middletown”), and inhibit replicability (or “revisits”) and sociological comparison. While some degree of masking is ethically and practically warranted in many cases and the value of disclosure varies across ethnographies, we conclude that masking should no longer be the default option that ethnographers unquestioningly choose.