Organise Microdata for Social Scientist

Data sharing for research

The UNHCR and Partner Name will identify the staff to be part of the joint research team. Any data shared under this agreement will not be provided to any third party. For its part, UNHCR agrees to share defined and agreed upon data with the Partner Name for the purposes of the Partner Name and UNHCR collaboration on this project herein-defined as “Project Name”. All information that would allow for identification of individuals will be excluded from these datasets, e.g. refugee ID number. UNHCR will share this information via a safe mechanism to reduce the likelihood of a third party accessing the data unlawfully. Partner Name will specify by name and title who will receive the information, who will have access to the information, and where the information will be kept, e.g. individual personal computer or server, all with the intent to avoid unlawful access and use of the information. Once the information is used for its defined purpose, the data will be disposed of at a date determined and in agreement by the two parties.

Anonymization techniques & Statistical disclosure control (SDC)

Once anonymised, a dataset does not fall anymore under the Policy on the Protection of Personal Data. Though there’s a few articles about the failure of anonymization that shows how removing names & ID is not always sufficient to prevent “data re-identification”. Many techniques can be used for “statistical disclosure control”: suppression, inference control, banardisation, rounding or sampling. Other approaches includes rules like for instance “do not share figures for a spatial unit if it does not reach the 1000 refugees threshold”…

A dedicated R module is availalble to perform anonymisation.

Restricting access to data

Need to set up a standard registry of person who work on UNHCR datasets

Engaging in “Research Agreement”

Research Confidentiality

A written and legally-binding Confidentiality Agreement must be signed by the lead researcher, all members of the research team that will have access to individually identifiable information from the records. The agreement coudl include the folowwing points:

Analysis Project Title Principal Investigator: UNHCR

I, Resesarcher Name, from Resesarch Organisation Name, as a member of this research team, understand that I may have access to confidential information about study sites and participants. By signing this statement, I am indicating my understanding of my responsibilities to maintain confidentiality and agree to the following:

keep all the research information shared with me confidential by not discussing or sharing the research information in any form or format (e.g., disks, tapes, transcripts) with anyone other than the Researcher(s).

keep all research information in any form or format (e.g., disks, tapes, transcripts) secure while it is in my possession.

return all research information in any form or format (e.g., disks, tapes, transcripts) to the Researcher(s) when I have completed the research tasks.

after consulting with the Researcher(s), erase or destroy all research information in any form or format regarding this research project that is not returnable to the Researcher(s) (e.g., information stored on computer hard drive).

notify the local principal investigator immediately should I become aware of an actual breach of confidentiality or a situation which could potentially result in a breach, whether this be on my part or on the part of another person.

Reproducible research

To ensure that research done on the dataset can be reproduced afterwards by internal staff both to check them and to refresh the analysis when we have new data a series of good practices shoudl be implemented:

For every result, keep track of how it was produced
Avoid manual data manipulation steps
Archive the exact versions of all external programs used
Version control all custom scripts
Record all intermediate results, when possible in standardized formats
For analyses that include randomness, note underlying random seeds
Always store raw data behind plots
Generate hierarchical analysis output, allowing layers of increasing detail to be inspected
Connect textual statements to underlying results
Provide public access to scripts, runs, and results

The Internation Household Survey Network & the DDI format

Humanitarian Research in the context of social science and data analysis is still new but can benefit the organisedtion for instance to:

Co-development and co-design of tools, protocols, products, processes, and innovations
Facilitate organisational learning, keeping track of lessons learned, and providing a neutral stance for moderating innovation and change processes
Access to wider body of knowledge, from academia or other organisations, and research in other fields.

7zip

To facilitate this process, the first approach woudl be to document the dataset according to the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) metadata standard developped by the International Household Survey Network (IHSN).

Once the metadata are generated in the right format, it becomes possible to publish them within the ISHN Microdata catalog or the World Bank Microdata Library