Police Discretion with Young Offenders
Methodological Appendix
Annex A-4. Confidentiality Protocol
Police Discretion with Young Offenders
Interviews and Documents: Confidentiality Protocol
Our arrangements to protect the privacy of participants in this research are based on three premises:
- The research is being done under contract to the Department of Justice Canada, which, under the terms of the contract, will hold copyright on any reports written in connection with the research.
- It is the expressed intention of Justice Canada to release the final report publicly.
- Participation in the research, whether by organizations or individuals, is entirely voluntary.
We have adopted the following measures to protect the privacy of individuals and police services:
- No information on identifiable young persons will be recorded or collected, and no information which might identify a young person will be included in any of our reports.
- We recognize that most internal police documents which are provided to us, although they are not necessarily identified as confidential, are not intended for public release. Therefore, we will not reveal their contents to anyone outside our research staff, or reproduce them or quote from them in our reports, without first obtaining the written permission of the police service which provided them.
- No individual will be referenced in our reports, except that: each individual who provides information to us will be acknowledged in an appendix to the Final Report, provided that s/he has given consent to being so acknowledged. In the case of police services for which only one or two individuals provided information, such acknowledgment could conceivably lead to a reader of the report being able to deduce the identity of the person who provided the information. In such cases, individuals who wish to protect their identities should request that they not be acknowledged.
Interviews will be tape recorded, with the consent of the person(s) being interviewed. Tape recording is very important to the integrity of the research, for two reasons:
- A transcript of a tape recorded interview is infinitely more accurate than the interviewer's recollections.
- The interviewer cannot successfully conduct an interview while simultaneously trying to take notes.
In addition to the protections listed above, the identities of individuals and police services participating in tape recorded interviews will be further protected by the following measures:
- The person being interviewed may, at any time during the interview, require that the tape recorder be turned off temporarily, in order to provide confidential background information.
- The contents of the interviews will not be revealed to anyone outside our research staff, except as part of our reports, and under the conditions listed above to protect the privacy of individuals and police services.
- As far as possible, the person(s) being interviewed, and the police service to which s/he belongs, will not be identified in the tape recording. Taped interviews will be identified only by code numbers, and a key connecting the code numbers to individuals and police services will be kept in secure locked storage separately from the tapes and transcripts. Nevertheless, we recognize that there is some possibility that the name of the police service may come up during the interview.
- Tapes, transcripts, and the key connecting taped interviews and individuals' names, will always be kept in secure, locked storage.
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Any member of our research staff who has access to the documentary information, tapes, transcripts, or the interview identity information, will be required to agree in writing to the provisions of this Confidentiality Protocol.
For further information, please contact the undersigned at 519-743-0214 or by email at pjcco@sympatico.ca; or the Project Authority for Justice Canada, Jharna Chatterjee, at 613 954 3591 or by email at JChatter@justice.gc.ca.
Peter Carrington, PhD
Principal Investigator
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