Hi Kevin - the main way of overcoming this is to identify the demographics of your sample population and their role, locations etc within your manuscript. This is either in text or tabulated. For instance, the quotation/narrative might be 'participant 2', their role might be 'Director', their location might be 'hospital' etc. You may not mean that though i.e. might you also mean the participant, quotation, narrative contained details about other people's names or specific locations? If that is the case - you can either use pseudonyms for names and locations - and highlight that is the case.

Sounds like a question you should be discussing with your IRB.

Somewhat related. How to protect anonymity for a case study related to a rare condition in a small country? Only one hospital with one medical team that deals with the medical condition and the condition only occurs very rarely - this one case in last ten years. Case study is focused on one aspect of how case was handled and how the service user might have been facilitated to be involved more in decisions about their treatment and care with a better outcome for their psychological health (service-user now has post-traumatic stress disorder from the situation believing there might have been a different long-term medical outcome if they had been more assertive and listened to).

You can add in your method that ‘all names anonymised, but known to the research team’

Yep, these helpful tips help verify the approach I have used.

btw Dennis, I did contact my IRB office who told me my qualitative case study "does not meet the regulatory definition of research, not only because of the human subject aspect but because it was not a systematic investigation designed to test a research hypothesis." and "my suggestion is that you check with legal counsel as well--the University may have other requirements." (Good to know... but not helpful)

This problem - public records do not fall under any form of IRB/protection of subjects; but their use can violate protection of human subjects - was answered by an old friend and mentor. His advise was:

"As Journal publication guidelines differ. Sometimes, I saw list of references including square brackets such as, for instance:

Smith, C. (2014). "Interior Design Pedagogy: Social Responsibility Impacts", in The London Times [Location Omitted for Anonymity]."

Are there any problems using this reference method? Still too easy to find the original and therefore know the location? Perhaps.

Another solution, and the one I am going with, is to delete any reference citations that may pose a problem with anonymity.