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How do I cite institutional course content, outcome and evaluation information in APA when the institutions have been guaranteed anonymity
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This is really a question for your Research Methods / Human Subjects / Research Ethics committee or department (every University uses a different name, these are the people who look over research before it is done to make sure it is ethical). They have certainly run into this sort of issue before and have a protocol in place to help you.
The simplest way is to create a table (which you show to no one and which is not published with the final work), and match "University A" with UCLA, "University B" with Harvard, etc. You remove the obviously identifiable data (like "University A, with an enrollment in 2008 of xx,xxx", since that's easy to look up and break your anonymity). At the worst case, you would give copies of your table to your advisor/instructor, and possibly if pressed the review committee if we're talking about a Thesis/Dissertation.
There is no reason that any institution should actually have to be named directly in your research. Your data is assumed to be valid, and if questioned later, you do have a table to convert pseudonyms back to real schools. Some institutions actually have trusts or private archives that will store this privileged information and release it only under very specific circumstances.
Alternately, you could go back and ask all the institutions to waive their right to anonymity. You asked for data and guaranteed anonymity. That doesn't automatically mean they really care about being anonymous. That's totally related to the nature of the data you collected and how you're using it of course, but if you had a waiver letter from every school, there is no reason you'd have to obscure anything (but it needs to be unanimous).
You can also use aggregate data, this is what schools, districts and even governments use to disclose "academic achievement" (ie confidential grades, scores, etc), without breaking confidence. If you said "among the top three performing schools in the survey, 97 students were found to have..." then no one can tell if that was 97 from one school, or about 32 from each, or what. As long as you do not allow any direct match of data to confidential/anonymous source, you should be okay.
The simplest way is to create a table (which you show to no one and which is not published with the final work), and match "University A" with UCLA, "University B" with Harvard, etc. You remove the obviously identifiable data (like "University A, with an enrollment in 2008 of xx,xxx", since that's easy to look up and break your anonymity). At the worst case, you would give copies of your table to your advisor/instructor, and possibly if pressed the review committee if we're talking about a Thesis/Dissertation.
There is no reason that any institution should actually have to be named directly in your research. Your data is assumed to be valid, and if questioned later, you do have a table to convert pseudonyms back to real schools. Some institutions actually have trusts or private archives that will store this privileged information and release it only under very specific circumstances.
Alternately, you could go back and ask all the institutions to waive their right to anonymity. You asked for data and guaranteed anonymity. That doesn't automatically mean they really care about being anonymous. That's totally related to the nature of the data you collected and how you're using it of course, but if you had a waiver letter from every school, there is no reason you'd have to obscure anything (but it needs to be unanimous).
You can also use aggregate data, this is what schools, districts and even governments use to disclose "academic achievement" (ie confidential grades, scores, etc), without breaking confidence. If you said "among the top three performing schools in the survey, 97 students were found to have..." then no one can tell if that was 97 from one school, or about 32 from each, or what. As long as you do not allow any direct match of data to confidential/anonymous source, you should be okay.
source(s):
Going through my own Honors Thesis in Undergraduate, Master's Thesis in Grad school, and a year and a half of cyclical torment that was helping my wife with her Disseration. Also teaching students in my English classes how to do research and write about it.
Going through my own Honors Thesis in Undergraduate, Master's Thesis in Grad school, and a year and a half of cyclical torment that was helping my wife with her Disseration. Also teaching students in my English classes how to do research and write about it.
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