When people allow researchers to investigate them, they often negotiate terms for the agreement. Participants in research may, for example, consent on the basis that the information obtained about them will be used only by the researchers and only in particular ways. The information is private and is voluntarily offered to the researcher in confidence. Researchers can justify protecting confidentiality by appealing to consequentialist-, rights- or fidelity-based arguments. Failure to respect confidentiality might not only affect one research project but could have a 'chilling effect' on all criminological research. However, various criminologists and socio-legal researchers have come under institutional, legal, physical and ethical pressures to disclose confidential information. They have been subpoenaed, imprisoned and have faced threats from armed drug dealers. To protect their sources, they have lied to correctional authorities, prosecutors and police as well as to armed drug dealers. In this paper, I examine some of the legal and methodological measures that researchers have taken to protect data as well as some of the rationales that might justify disclosing information given in confidence by research participants.
 
 

Date: Thursday, 27 Feb 2003

Time: 6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.

Venue: 14/F, Senior Common Room, K.K. Leung Bldg., The University of Hong Kong.
 

Dr. Mark Israel --- Mark has a degree in law and postgraduate qualifications in sociology, criminology and education. Between 1988 and 1992, he lectured in the United Kingdom. He moved to Australia in 1993. He has published in the areas of criminology (crime and the media, state violence, community corrections), victimology, racism (racial discrimination in recruitment, indigenous under-representation on juries, antisemitism), migration, and education (teaching criminology). He is author of South African Political Exile in the United Kingdom published by Macmillan (1999) and co-editor of International Victimology (Australian Institute of Criminology, 1996), Criminal Justice in Diverse Communities (Federation, 2000), and Crime and Justice In Australia (Lawbook Company, 2003). In 1999 and 2000, he was the winner of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology's Young Scholar Award. He is no longer young but is an Associate Editor of Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology and a member of the Editorial Boards of Critical Criminology and the Online Journal of Justice Studies. Mark's current research interests are race and jury selection; state crime; effectiveness and credibility of community-based punishments; and research ethics.