One of the most important rules of market research is to protect the confidentiality of respondents. When people have taken the time to respond to a survey, their answers must be held in the strictest confidence. This means that the client (user of the data) should not have any idea about who said what, or who filled out a particular questionnaire. The only exception to this would be if you included a blank space on the questionnaire for the respondent's name and contact information, with a note indicating that the respondent should only include his name if he desires someone at the client organization to contact him. Questionnaires should not be coded in any way which will enable the identity of the respondents to be uncovered.

Confidentiality is important in any survey, but is particularly important in an employee survey. Employees must be protected against the possibility that their supervisors will be able to discover how individual employees have responded. This means that the data from the questionnaire must be entered by a neutral third party. If a corporation chooses to conduct its own employee survey, a trustworthy individual must be found (still, preferably, someone outside the corporation) to make certain that the questionnaires do not fall into the wrong hands. Comments should be edited to remove any occurrences where employees have signed or otherwise indicated their identity in the survey. Results from sub-groups (departments) should only be reported if there are enough responses to prevent a supervisor from guessing who has responded and who has not. After the data has been entered and the comments have been transcribed, the original questionnaires should be destroyed to prevent unscrupulous employees from recognizing the handwriting contained in the questionnaires.

The primary reason for maintaining confidentiality is an ethical one. There are other reasons as well. If respondents feel that their confidentiality has in any way be breached, they will be upset, they may not respond honestly in future surveys, or they may not respond at all in future surveys.

The importance of this issue cannot be understated. The Business Research Lab will not work with any client who expresses a desire to breach the confidentiality of a survey. Anyone wishing to implement one of our questionnaires on their own must sign an agreement indicating that they will not breach confidentiality.

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