Improving Access to and Confidentiality of Research Data

Improving Access to and Confidentiality of Research Data summarizes a workshop convened by the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) to promote discussion about methods for advancing the often conflicting goals of exploiting the research potential of microdata and maintaining acceptable levels of confidentiality. This report outlines essential themes of the access versus confidentiality debate that emerged during the workshop. Among these themes are the tradeoffs and tensions between the needs of researchers and other data users on the one hand and confidentiality requirements on the other; the relative advantages and costs of data perturbation techniques (applied to facilitate public release) versus restricted access as tools for improving security; and the need to quantify disclosure risks--both absolute and relative--created by researchers and research data, as well as by other data users and other types of data.