DBAX 9104C Week 8 Disclosure Decisions Example

State It, Generalize It or Drop It: Disclosure Decisions for a Consulting Study of a Single-Office Structural Engineering Firm, Where a Few True Details Would Name the Firm and Its Principals

Student Name

Walden University

DBAX 9104C: Business Consulting Research Project Stage 4

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

State It, Generalize It or Drop It: Disclosure Decisions for a Consulting Study of a Single-Office Structural Engineering Firm, Where a Few True Details Would Name the Firm and Its Principals

The Problem With True Details

A small firm can be recognized from a handful of true details. My consulting study examined why a single-office structural engineering firm was losing design work on mid-size commercial projects to larger competitors. The firm has 23 employees, three principals and one specialty that is unusual in its region. Anyone in the regional building industry who read "a 23-person structural firm in a mid-sized Southern city founded in 1994 that specializes in parking structures" would know which firm it is, and from there which principal said what. Kaiser (2009) calls this deductive disclosure: identifying participants from details that seem harmless one at a time. This document decides, for each identifying detail, what the published study may state and what the client report may say, and records the reason.

Two Readers, Two Needs

The published study will sit in the university's repository, readable by anyone, including competitors and clients of the firm. The client report goes only to the three principals. The principals already know who they are and who said what, so the client report can say more about the firm itself; but it must still protect employees and the principals from each other where a remark was made in confidence. Tolich (2004) distinguishes external confidentiality, protecting participants from outsiders, from internal confidentiality, protecting them from others inside the same setting who can recognize them. Both matter here.

The Decisions

Table 1

Identifying Details and Disclosure Decisions

Decisions agreed with the principals in a meeting on September 18.

Detail by Detail

The specialty was the hardest call. Parking structures matter to the findings: the firm's competitors for that work are national firms with in-house parking divisions, which explains part of why bids were lost. Dropping the specialty from the published study removes that context. The compromise is to keep the finding, that the firm competes against much larger specialist divisions, without naming the specialty. A reader loses some precision; the firm is not identified.

The two named projects were dropped from both documents. They were vivid examples of lost bids, but the findings rest on 64 bid records over four years, not on any two projects. Saunders et al. (2015) argue that anonymization requires weighing what each detail adds to the findings against the risk it creates; these projects added color, not evidence.

The disagreement between principals is the most sensitive finding. Two principals favored bidding for public-sector work, which pays slowly but steadily; one opposed it. The disagreement explains why the firm had not diversified. It must be reported, because it bears on the research question. But stating who held which view would expose a confidence, since each principal spoke to me separately. Both documents state the disagreement and not the positions.

Where Disguise Would Change the Finding

One detail could not be disguised without changing a finding. The firm's size matters: the study found that clients on mid-size projects increasingly prefer firms that can provide structural, civil and mechanical services together, which a 20 to 30 person firm cannot. Changing the size to disguise the firm would change the finding. The range "20 to 30 employees" keeps the finding true while widening the field of firms it could describe.

Review by the Firm

The principals reviewed the decision table, not the findings. They asked for one change: that the founding year be dropped from the client report too, since it would appear in any version that circulated beyond them. That request was accepted. They did not review or change any finding, which keeps the decisions about disclosure separate from decisions about content.

References

Kaiser, K. (2009). Protecting respondent confidentiality in qualitative research. Qualitative Health Research, 19(11), 1632-1641. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732309350879

Saunders, B., Kitzinger, J., & Kitzinger, C. (2015). Anonymising interview data: Challenges and compromise in practice. Qualitative Research, 15(5), 616-632. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794114550439

Tolich, M. (2004). Internal confidentiality: When confidentiality assurances fail relational informants. Qualitative Sociology, 27(1), 101-106. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:QUAS.0000015546.20441.4a