So that is something you can only solve if you write some kind of legend, in which you explain that certain words used to assign text to a respondent, can make it unclear that the words were uttered by the same person. Or if you can use different fonts, and are willing to keep track of which respondent belongs to which font, you could solve your problem that way.

However I would expect that most readers do not mind you figuratively dissect your respondents. As the ideas in your report are more important than the sources they come from.

If people always wanted to know exactly who said what, they would have developed that ability long ago, when they first started talking. However most people only want to know the who and what in certain situations, depending on their personal experiences. So if you can appoint an idea to someone, you should. But if you create a new idea based on the ideas of someone else, you only quote the original idea if it is necessary to understand your idea. At a certain moment quoting and citing becomes useless, if you present ideas that are new and different from what others know and think.

It probably would have been impossible for Einstein to write down his ideas about the relativity theory, if he would have had to quote and cite everybody, that might have had some kind of influence on his ideas.

I haven’t linked to Lilia Efimova in a while, but she continues to write about her PhD process and say things that I think have to do with the larger questions of how people work together (one element being knowledge management)….

Your post takes this deeper – traditionally the role of the academic journal has been as gatekeeper of knowledge within the discipline – as an academic I work on the information I know is reliable becuase of the source – and of course referencing makes that explicit. What I absorb into my thoughts is controlled as part of the discipline.

What your post raises therefore is the deeper question about the role of the internet – not only does it make it easier for students to find and use information from outside the discipline – the wikipedia problem, but in knowledge generation we need a new way of controlling our own inputs to maintain some disciplinary boundaries around what we absorb into the development of our disciplines.