The week 8 session came with a whole consent procedure for asking three people
a question. Say who you are, accept a no immediately, do not approach anybody
distressed.
Which made me notice that for the other eleven weeks I have been recording
roughly two hundred people a session without any of them knowing, and nobody
has asked me to say anything to anybody.
I am not saying the policy is wrong. I am saying I cannot articulate why one
of those needs a script and the other does not, and I would like to be able
to.
5 replies
Bea LindqvistWeek 8, 27 Apr 2027
I had the same reaction in the audit session. Asking three people how long they had been waiting felt completely different from counting two hundred of them, and the one that needed a script was the smaller number.
This is the right question and it is worth more than the answer. The line the policy draws is between counting events and recording people. A tally of arrivals holds nothing that could identify anybody and could be reconstructed by any person standing there with the same view. A conversation holds a person's words, which is theirs, so it needs their yes.
What I will not tell you is that the line is obviously in the right place. It is a defensible line rather than a self-evident one, and research ethics committees argue about exactly where it sits. If your answer to Whose Time It Was wants to argue it is in the wrong place, that is a real position and it is markable.
Ravi SundaramWeek 8, 29 Apr 2027
The thing that shifted it for me is that the queue already ranks those people and nobody asked them about that either. Measuring the ranking seems like the smaller intrusion.
Tomas RehakWeek 9, 4 May 2027
That last point is the one I could not get past, and it is now the opening paragraph of my essay. Thanks all.