Most presentations to survey results anonymize the submissions, so specific people are not identified with specific responses.

If participants were not informed, this is a significant breach of ethics.

Can we associate your name / blog name with your responses or would you rather stay anonymous?

The two response choices were:

1. Yes, feel free to associate me with my survey responses
2. No, you may use my responses but I’d rather remain anonymous

If you download and open the Excel file, you can see this item (column AF) and you can see that we deleted the cells in columns AC-AE (i.e., the rest of the purple area) for those folks that said they would rather remain anonymous. That’s why I said in the post above that it’s a ‘privacy-protected’ Excel file.

As a university faculty member at one of the world’s largest research institutions, I am extremely cognizant of the need to respect respondents’ confidentiality. I think I did so for this survey, but if you have additional recommendations, I’d love to hear them for next time. Thanks.

I still feel uneasy about it. If I answered the survey, I did so anonymously. But now it looks like I was a ‘dastardly scoundrels’ who didn’t fill it out. Should I now tick the box in order to receive credit?

It leaves open the possibility that people didn’t realize what they were agreeing to when they checked the box. It also creates a pressure to write appropriate or acceptable answers.

It is certainly unusual. I cannot recall seeing any other survey reported with the respondents identified in this way.

Your point about folks feeling like they had to identify themselves in order to not be labeled a ‘dastardly scoundrel’ or a ‘notty-pated hedgepig’ is an interesting one. Perhaps for a few folks that was true. Hopefully, however, most folks understood that I was writing those phrases in a joking, tongue-in-cheek manner and didn’t feel any duress or undue pressure. I didn’t note in any way whatsoever the folks who chose not to respond or wished to remain anonymous. I merely listed the individuals who agreed to have their names made public so that others could hopefully find some new, interesting blogs to start visiting.

Thanks for the concern and for sticking up for your fellow education bloggers. I appreciate your input and will continue to think about how I might do things differently next January.

Anyway, great job & thank you.

And, if you’d like me to remove the posting to slideshare, just let me know. I know; I should have asked first…