People or sources that you need to make anonymous for ethical reasons
Answer
For courses involving placements or professional experiences, or if you carry out research in these areas, it’s unethical to name people or organisations directly. You should change the names of people and organisations to code names.
Examples
In your research, you used Midtown High School’s Behaviour management policy and Uptown Grammar School’s Pupil code of conduct. In your assignment you might change the name ‘Midtown High School’ to ‘Secondary School A’ and ‘Uptown Grammar School’ to ‘Secondary School B’.
An in-text reference may look like this:
Strategies include working with pupils to create "personalised positive behaviour plans" (Secondary school A, 2015a)...
In an interview, a teacher from Midtown High School says something of interest. You might change the name of the teacher to ‘Teacher A1’ to show that they were from Midtown High School. A teacher from Uptown Grammar School might therefore become ‘Teacher B1’.
Use the code names in all your in-text citations and in your full reference list.
In your reference list entry, you must also remove anything from the publication details that might identify organisations or people – even if this means that you have to leave out parts of the full reference that you would normally include (for example, the URL of the source).
Example
Secondary school A (2017) Behaviour management policy.
Rather than
Secondary school A (2017) Behaviour management policy. Available at http://www.uptown.sch.uk/upload/docs/behaviour-management.pdf (Accessed: 23 May 2019).
