The National Academies’ has published Expanding Access to Research Data: Reconciling Risks and Opportunities advising two groups — statistical agencies and other data providers and the research community — on how to more fully protect data confidentiality while making rich microdata available for research use to support public policy. The report addresses issues raised by changes in the legal, technological, and social environment in the past decade.
Policy makers need information about the state of the nation ranging from trends in the overall economy to household use of Medicare in order to evaluate existing programs and to develop new ones. This information often comes from research based on data about individual people, households, and businesses and other organizations, collected by statistical agencies under a pledge of confidentiality. The most critical data are microdata—data about individual people, households, and businesses and other organizations.
The benefits of providing wider access to researchers and analysts are better informed public policies. To realize this benefit, a variety of modes for data access including restricted access to confidential data and unrestricted access to appropriately altered public-use data must be used.
However, the risk of expanded access to potentially sensitive data is the risk that confidentiality of the data may be breached, which would erode public confidence in the data collection enterprise. The statistical system of the United States ultimately depends on the willingness of the public to provide the information on which research data are based.
To address these issues, the National Research Council’s Committee on National Statistics formed the Panel on Data Access for Research Purposes with funding from the National Institute on Aging. The panel was charged to assess approaches to promoting exploitation of the research use of microdata while preserving respondent confidentiality. They were asked to consider the tradeoffs between the benefits and risks of data access and to make recommendations about how the data should be made available to researchers.
The panel concludes that no one way is optimal for all data users or all purposes. To meet society’s needs for high-quality research and statistics, agencies must provide both unrestricted access to anonymized public-use files and restricted access to detailed, individually identifiable confidential data for researchers under carefully specified conditions through such means as remote monitored on-line access, licensing, and protected enclaves (research data centers).
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