FAQs

✦ What’s in place to make sure that taking part doesn’t impact my work? 

The whole team is extremely aware of the many ways in which public perception of Arts professionals can impact a career. We are also very aware that there is sadly still significant stigma and discrimination attached to mental health in our sector, particularly when talking about more long-term, severe and complex experiences.

With this in mind the whole research has been designed to protect the identity of participants, including a layer of checks looking for industry specific identifiers, such as if a person mentions details of a production that could indirectly identify them or someone else.

The researcher and her team are also obliged to treat any knowledge of participation as confidential, so they are not allowed to tell people you participate. The only exception to this would be in the unlikely event that a serious threat of danger is identified, in which case they might have to call for help or advice, probably from an emergency service such as ambulance or police. Even in this situation, participation will only be mentioned if necessary and only shared with people who need to know. No employers or colleagues would be contacted by the research team unless you specifically requested it.

✦ What if I want to talk about taking part? 

That’s absolutely great! We would love for you to share what we’re doing, and hopefully participating in this research will be a good experience that you will want to discuss with people. The important thing is that people know they won’t be ‘outed’ by taking part.

✦ I’ve heard about anonymous, pseudonymised, anonymised, and confidential information – what’s the difference? 

In research anonymous data collection is when people who take part provide information in a way that can’t be linked back to them. For example, if you click on a general survey link and you take part without giving your name or other personal information then the information you give would be considered anonymous data. 

Under GDPR you then have anonymised and pseudonymised or pseudo-anonymised data – don’t worry if you’re not familiar with the difference, most people aren’t!

When data is anonymised it means that anything that could identify an individual has been taken out but it was there at one point. Once data is anonymised it should be impossible for the source of the information to be identified. 

While fully anonymising data might seem ideal it can take out important information so researchers often use pseudonymised or pseudo-anonymised data instead. This can be seen as one step off fully anonymised because somewhere there is a link between the data and the person who provided it, but the aim is still to protect the identity of the people taking part. If you’ve ever seen an article that says ‘names changed to protect identities’ there’s a good chance they’re using pseudonymised data because the interviewer probably knows who they’re quoting or could find out from the information they have saved. 

Keeping information confidential means not sharing it outside of an agreed group of people. It might be to do with protecting someone’s identity, but it might also be about other things like not sharing an innovation from a company with potential competitors. In this project the research team have to keep the identities of anyone they know has taken part confidential. 

This page is meant to give short answers to general questions. More detailed information is provided on the participant information sheets that anyone thinking of taking part will be given. You can also CONTACT Alice if you have any specific questions you would like her to answer.