Pesquisas de Avaliação e Confidencialidade da Informação: Limites e Conflitos

Abstract

This paper presents legislations, academic discussions, and the understandings and practices of the official statistical agencies related to the ethical parameters that regulate the evaluation and monitoring of public policies research-with emphasis on aspects of privacy, anonymity and confidentiality. The enforcement of the legislations that establishes ethical principles for conducting research with human beings-which were elaborated in the first place to regulate researches in the Biomedicine field-and the official statistics' principles of the National Statistical System, that value secrecy and confidentiality, have stimulated several discussions in the Applied Social Sciences field, especially when these principles are expected to regulate qualitative researches. In this kind of research, the compliance with these principles creates some conflicts related to the requirement to respect confidentiality and secrecy and the need to use the instrumental information to support an intervening position, in which the problems identified are corrected. Thus, the aim of this paper is to contribute to this discussion by exploring the understandings and practices that should be applied to the federal public administration agencies that are part of the National Statistical System.