To keep children and young people safe in schools and colleges, you need to share information appropriately so the correct decisions can be made to protect them. This is why the government has outlined the seven golden rules for information sharing as safeguarding involves sensitive information which directly affects the welfare of children and young people.
However, clear boundaries around information sharing or disclosures are important to maintain confidentiality where appropriate. Underneath the seven golden rules for information sharing below, you’ll also find a useful flowchart of key questions.
1. GDPR Isn’t a Barrier to Sharing Information
With GDPR coming into effect in 2018, it’s assumed that this statutory requirement doesn’t allow you to share information. This isn’t the case. The Data Protection Act isn’t a barrier to sharing information but it provides a framework which ensures that personal information about living individuals is shared appropriately.
2. Be Open and Honest
You need to be open and honest with the child, young person and/or their family where appropriate about why, what, how and with who you will or could share information with. You also need to seek their agreement unless it’s inappropriate or unsafe to do so.
3. Seek Advice
If you’re ever in any doubt about sharing or disclosing the information concerned, seek advice from other practitioners such as your school or college’s Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL). You should try to do this without disclosing the identity of the individual where possible.
4. Share With Consent Where Appropriate
Where possible, respect the wishes of those who don’t give consent for you to share their confidential information. However, depending on the nature of the situation and what a child or young person has disclosed, you may still share information without consent.
This is if there’s a good reason to do so in your judgement, such as where safety can be at risk.
5. Consider Safety and Wellbeing
Base your information sharing decisions on considerations of the safety and wellbeing of the child or young person - as well as anyone else who may be affected by their actions.
6. Necessary, Proportionate, Relevant, Adequate, Accurate, Timely and Secure
Ensure the information you share is necessary for the purpose for which you share it. You should share it only with those people who need to have it, your information is accurate, up-to-date, shared in a timely fashion and also shared securely.
7. Keep a Record
Regardless of the decision you make, keep a record of it and the reasons why you made that decision. If you decide to share following a disclosure, then record what you’ve shared, with who and for what purpose.
Even with the government’s seven golden rules for sharing information, it can be challenging in a real-life situation when you need to make the tough decision on whether or not you should share information.
To help make that process easier, here’s a flowchart of key questions for information sharing to help you make the right call if you’re ever in that situation.
Information sharing is just one area of safeguarding. Although these conversations can be tough, it’s vital you’re fully prepared on all things safeguarding so you know the correct steps to take. With so much information floating around online, it can be challenging to take it all in and remember it.
To help, we’ve created the safeguarding handbook full of all the essential information you’ll need.
Get Your Safeguarding Handbook
By clicking the link below, you’ll get access to your all-in-one, go-to resource for all things safeguarding. From how to prepare for disclosures, what to do during one, spotting signs of abuse, the legalities and so much more, it’s all in there.
Get your copy now.
Learning Objectives
- Identify the six questions social researchers should be able to answer to ensure that their ethical obligations have been met.
- Describe how differences in one’s audience might shape how a person shares research findings.
When preparing to share our work with others we must decide what to share, with whom to share it, and in what format(s) to share it. In this section, we’ll consider the former two aspects of sharing our work. In the sections that follow, we’ll consider the various formats and mechanisms through which social scientists might share their work.
Because conducting sociological research is a scholarly pursuit and because sociological researchers generally aim to reach a true understanding of social processes, it is crucial that we share all aspects of our research—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Doing so helps ensure that others will understand, be able to build from, and effectively critique our work. We considered this aspect of the research process in Chapter 3 "Research Ethics", but it is worth reviewing here.
In Chapter 3 "Research Ethics", we learned about the importance of sharing all aspects of our work for ethical reasons and for the purpose of replication. In preparing to share your work with others, and in order to meet your ethical obligations as a sociological researcher, challenge yourself to answer the following questions:
- Why did I conduct this research?
- How did I conduct this research?
- For whom did I conduct this research?
- What conclusions can I reasonably draw from this research?
- Knowing what I know now, what would I do differently?
- How could this research be improved?
Understanding why you conducted your research will help you be honest—with yourself and your readers—about your own personal interest, investments, or biases with respect to the work. In Chapter 4 "Beginning a Research Project", I suggested that starting where you are is a good way to begin a research project. While this is true, using the idea of starting where you are effectively requires that you be honest with yourself and your readers about where you are and why you have chosen to conduct research in a particular area. Being able to clearly communicate how you conducted your research is also important. This means being honest about your data collection methods, sample and sampling strategy, and analytic strategy.
The third question in the list is designed to help you articulate who the major stakeholders are in your research. Of course, the researcher is a stakeholder. Additional stakeholders might include funders, research participants, or others who share something in common with your research subjects (e.g., members of some community where you conducted research or members of the same social group, such as parents or athletes, upon whom you conducted your research). Professors for whom you conducted research as part of a class project might be stakeholders, as might employers for whom you conducted research. We’ll revisit the concept of stakeholders in Chapter 15 "Research Methods in the Real World".
The fourth question should help you think about the major strengths of your work. Finally, the last two questions are designed to make you think about potential weaknesses in your work and how future research might build from or improve upon your work.
Once you are able to articulate what to share, you must decide with whom to share it. Certainly the most obvious candidates with whom you’ll share your work are other social scientists. If you are conducting research for a class project, your main “audience” will probably be your professor. Perhaps you’ll also share your work with other students in the class. Other potential audiences include stakeholders, reporters and other media representatives, policymakers, and members of the public more generally.
While you would never alter your actual findings for different audiences, understanding who your audience is will help you frame your research in a way that is most meaningful to that audience. For example, I have shared findings from my study of older worker harassment with a variety of audiences, including students in my classes, colleagues in my own discipline (Blackstone, 2010) and outside of it (Blackstone, forthcoming), news reporters (Leary, 2010), the organization that funded my research (Blackstone, 2008), older workers themselves, and government (2010) and other agencies that deal with workplace policy and worker advocacy. I shared with all these audiences what I view as the study’s three major findings: that devaluing older workers’ contributions by ignoring them or excluding them from important decisions is the most common harassment experience for people in my sample, that there were few differences between women’s and men’s experiences and their perceptions of workplace harassment, and that the most common way older workers respond when harassed is to keep it to themselves and tell no one. But how I presented these findings and the level of detail I shared about how I reached these findings varied by audience.
I shared the most detail about my research methodology, including data collection method, sampling, and analytic strategy, with colleagues and with my funding agency. In addition, the funding agency requested and received information about the exact timeline during which I collected data and any minor bureaucratic hiccups I encountered during the course of collecting data. These hiccups had no bearing on the data actually collected or relevance to my findings, but they were nevertheless details to which I felt my funder should be privy. I shared similar information with my student audience though I attempted to use less technical jargon with students than I used with colleagues.
Now that you’ve considered what to share and with whom to share it, let’s consider how social scientists share their research.
Key Takeaways
- As they prepare to share their research, researchers must keep in mind their ethical obligations to their peers, their research participants, and the public.
- Audience peculiarities will shape how much and in what ways details about one’s research are reported.
Exercise
- Read a scholarly article of your choice. What evidence can you find that might indicate that the author gave some thought to the six questions outlined in this section?