Hi all,
I have an article that is undergoing peer-review in a regional journal. This is the first time I have made it to this point!
I am working on my next article but I have questions regarding ethics and potential legal issues.
My article focuses on a well known presidential candidate and his association with the NAACP. I have a trove of constituent letters about this issue and most of them are critical of this association between the NAACP and the candidate. One folder contains letters that are so awful, the campaign didn’t even respond to them. Some of the letters are from Southern preachers written on their church letterhead. While the senders are deceased they still have living immediate family members and in some cases their churches are still around.
On one hand, I feel like using some of these letters and considering the positions these people held, can be very effective for use in my article. On the other hand, the people that sent them likely didn’t expect their letters would be accessible in an archive and their family members and congregations may recoil at seeing their names in print along with the awful words they uttered.
Even if it isn’t unethical to publish their names, I don’t know if I want to invite personal attack against myself. In that case, can I cite letters without naming who wrote them? Can my citations refer to where the letters are located but not name the authors of said letters?
I appreciate your responses to this conundrum I find myself in.
Comments
What did your IRB say?
How did you find these letters? If they’re publicly available, you can of course cite them. Were you granted access to a database that is not available to the public (without or without a paywall)? If so, you really shouldn’t do anything that could compromise their confidentiality if they could reasonably assume confidentiality. I think this all falls under human subjects research (especially if they’re not on a publicly available website) and so you should reach out to your IRB or ethics board to first ask them informally about the issue and then they’ll give you specific advice once they know the details.
This should be fine. The letters are in a public place. Famous people are routinely written about (like by journalists) – there is nothing to worry about here.
You can publish their names, or you can choose to elide it in the text by saying things like, “One Baptist minister who wrote in said X”…
But you cannot abandon Chicago style for citing letters out of a fear of – personal attack? Are you worried that somebody’s going to somehow find out about your article and care so much that they launch a social media campaign against you? Are you sure that’s realistic?
If they wrote in, and on church letterhead, they absolutely expected their letters to be taken seriously. This isn’t like talking to a journalist off the record. It’s the literal opposite. And yes, you have to cite the letters correctly. Or don’t use them at all.