Applied Social Research and the Government: Notes on the Limits of Confidentiality

In this paper I examine some aspects of federal regulation and applied social research done under contract with U.S. government agencies. Specifically, the paper is focused upon the tension betweeen the accountability for public funds and the assurances of confidentiality that can be given realistically to informants by researchers. Contract work, commissioned by government offices, probably represents the most regulated and scrutinized social research being done in the country today. Because it is funded with both a purpose and a product in mind, contract research tends to be practical, of interest to various parties, and hence, research over which some controversy is likely to arise. Assuming that ethnographers increasingly will come to do contract work in applied situations, the case I present later in this paper may be viewed as a bellwether, rather than a curious or isolated instance of disagreement among some government agencies and some researchers.