4. Ethical & Legal Considerations in Interviews

Extract from “Ethical consideration dilemma”

“Providing anonymity to the interviewees means that all the information collected is devoid of personal details of the interviewee such as address, email, name and other key information that could lead to the identification of the interviewee (Crow and Wiles, 2008). Ensuring anonymity of information collected gives protection to the interviewees and allows them to give out key information which ensures reliability of findings (Saunders et al., 2015). This helps to protect the privacy of voluntary participants in the research investigation.

To gain reliable information from the interviewee, none must be forced or induced to participate in the research investigation. Forcing participant will mean that they are not willing to give out any information but for material compensation, they will take part which could lead to the collection of false information. Allowing for voluntary participation will ensure that participants understand the research area and accept to engage in the data collection (Mumford et al., 2021).

The ethical principle of non-maleficence and beneficence describes the researcher’s obligation to fully avoid causing any harm to the participant intentionally or be able to identify and eliminate any source of harm to the participant (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004). The researcher in this instance should not over-burden the participant with more questions or create a situation where the participant feels uncomfortable.”
— Laryeafio, M.N. and Ogbewe, O.C. (2023), “Ethical consideration dilemma: systematic review of ethics in qualitative data collection through interviews”, p. 102.

Illustrative Example: The Legal & Ethical Risk Assessment

Consider an enterprise SaaS company conducting a multinational market research project. They are interviewing corporate clients in Germany, California, and Brazil about user-experience friction points in their financial auditing software. The research team drafts a comprehensive risk assessment before launching:

  • GDPR & LGPD Compliance: They implement double-opt-in digital consent forms for participants in Germany and Brazil. They state clearly that participants can withdraw consent at any time and request full erasure of their session recordings within 30 days of the study’s completion.
  • CCPA Compliance: For California-based clients, they provide a prominent “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link on the research landing page and guarantee that user-interview data is kept strictly inside an internal research sandbox.
  • Employee and Client Duty of Care: To prevent professional risk, they strip all corporate names and specific product version numbers from the public reports. In the final slide deck, client representatives are referred to only by generic titles (e.g., “Senior Audit Manager, Financial Services Sector”) to avoid disclosing sensitive software stacks or internal organizational structures to competitors.
  • Secure Data Lifecycle: Video files are uploaded to an encrypted enterprise OneDrive folder. Direct identifying metadata (full names, corporate email addresses) is stored in a separate, access-restricted database and linked to the interview files only via non-descriptive numeric keys (e.g., “Participant #104”).