3.3 Protecting Research Materials

Research materials (e.g. datasets, records, artifacts, etc.) need to be protected from loss, theft, corruption and inappropriate access. There are a few simple things you can do to help protect these materials.

Ensuring Respondent Confidentiality

The UO Office for the Protection of Human Subjects can provide detailed information on protocols for protecting respondent confidentiality.
If datasets contain identifiable information on human subjects, a document outlining the terms and conditions of future access should be created by the research unit and deposited with the data.
De-identification can be a method of providing access to data that has identifiable information linked to the respondents.
Identifiers in data

Direct identifiers are data elements gathered that directly identify a respondent, like a complete name or address
Indirect identifiers are variables, that when aggregated can identify a subject
Geographic location-imbedded in data (like geo-referenced information or street addresses), sometimes overlooked can also create respondent identification.

As an alternative, datasets can become restricted use collections in a repository if de-identification impedes the research value of the data.

Controlled access with a list of approved researchers could be established so that mediated access is available.

Qualitative data such as audio or transcribed interviews, videos and ethnographic data are also problematic to de-identify.
For more information on anonymizing data can be found on the UK's Economic and Social Data Services website.
As mentioned in a previous section, ensuring respondent confidentiality can also be a challenge for preservation.

Protecting Data from Loss

Create and store backups of data on a regular basis (the backup procedure should be in the data management plan).

Create regular (e.g. daily, weekly or monthly - depending how often data is changing) backups of data and store the copy offsite.
You can use traditional tape backup, another server, a portable hard drive or CD-ROM (optical media like a CD is not as reliable and is not preferred) to store your backup.
Make sure to properly dispose of the backups once they are no longer needed to protect any confidential information in the dataset.

Return to 3.0 Conducting Research
Proceedu to 4.0 Closing the Project

Maintained by: Erin O'Meara, erino@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 01/14/2008