Conceptualization Of Privilege And Confidentiality In Research

One of the more challenging tasks in maintaining ethical standards in the field of psychology is to distinguish between both the moral and legal conceptualizations of privacy, confidentiality, and privilege in terms of client information. Thus, a perfect place to begin this assessment is by reviewing the practicality and application of the laws and professional guidelines pertaining to confidentiality in order to segregate these three distinctive concepts. Privacy, for instance, refers to the “control over the extent, timing, and circumstances of sharing oneself (physically, behaviorally, or intellectually) with others,” (The Regents of the University of California, 2015, para. 6) in accordance with the ethical standards and civil rights afforded to patients, clients, or research subjects to help protect personal information. In other words, the concept of privacy applies directly to a specific person and includes such information as the setting or context in which professional services are provided and the methods used to collect personal information, as well as the type of information collected by the practitioner. Confidentiality, by comparison, is usually perceived as being an extension of privacy (Koocher & Keith-Spiegel, 2016), although it …show more content…
According to the legal definition of privilege, however, the term describes more of a relationship to information and commonly comes up in the context of legal proceedings when one party attempts to access private information of the alternate party, although law usually protects this type of information since most privileged communications are exchanged among partners involved in either a personal or a professional relationship, thereby giving it an inherent expectation of confidentiality (Koocher & Keith-Spiegel,