‘Collecting data’ in this project was never going to be straightforward. We want to speak to social workers about their day-to-day practices, and the writing and recording work they do that concerns service users/clients with real-life difficulties, dilemmas and details. We also hope to collect lots of documents written, which 9 times out of 10 will be about vulnerable people facing tough times. So how can we work with local authorities and social workers, in a way that offers sufficient assurance that all documents will be anonymised (and not just have black marks drawn through names), and that any reporting of documents or cases will not make any person, place or organisation identifiable?

It goes without saying that all documents shared with us need to be anonymised. What I probably hadn’t realised though is that all documents shared with us need anonymising before we can access them. This means I can’t even help do the anonymisation, and we need to figure out how to ask others to code without us having seen the kinds of identifying information that might need anonymising. So the person/people who can do the anonymisation work then, has to be a member of authority staff already so that they have clearance to see the documents, they have to have time outside their normal work hours to take this on, and then of course they have to be willing to do the work for us. As I will be keeping contact with at least one lady who has very kindly agreed to do some of our anonymisation for us (who we will of course pay from the project budget), I need to get my head around: 1) what needs anonymising in terms of data protection; 2) what level of detail we want to keep in the documents by coding rather than black marking the anonymisation; 3) what level of detail is manageable by someone coming into the project cold; 4) what level of contact with the person anonymising would be helpful, but not overwhelming or just simply annoying