Designing Research to Produce Usable Knowledge from Archives that Have Significant Ethical and Privacy Constraints

Archives are sometimes imagined to be dusty repositories of historical documents. The considerations of care and ethical practice at the heart of qualitative research with active participants may not seem relevant. However, when archives contain sensitive information about people, living or no longer living, and those people cannot be consulted about the use of the materials, significant ethical issues arise. This paper offers innovative ways of balancing a desire to explore the treasures of a highly sensitive archive with rigorous attention to the rights and interests of those whose stories the archive holds. Based on research with a video archive of recorded therapy sessions left by Michael White, the co-originator of narrative therapy, my paper sets out a series of innovative responses to ethical considerations about the right to privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity. These include strategies to anonymize data while retaining context, re-presenting material in the archive so that it could be shared, creating a role for an advocate on behalf of people recorded in the archive, and using subjective learnings from the archive as a basis for collective practice-based research. This enabled the generation of research findings that are directly applicable to practitioners. The practices described make possible an “opening” of a previously locked archive. They also set out a possible pathway for others seeking to conduct research with highly sensitive archives.