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Data protection, rights and access: Confidentiality

Confidentiality refers to the researcher’s agreement with the participant about how the participant’s identifiable private information will be handled, managed, and disseminated. The research proposal should outline strategies to maintain confidentiality of identifiable data, including controls on storage, handling, and sharing of personal data.

You can minimise the risk of disclosing confidential information when designing your research by considering the following factors and approaches:

  • If possible, collect the necessary data without using personally identifying information.
  • If personally identifying information is required, de-identify your data upon collection or as soon as possible thereafter.
  • Avoid transmitting unencrypted personal data electronically.

Other considerations include retention of original collection instruments, such as paper questionnaires or interview recordings. Once these are transferred into an analysis package or a transcript and quality assured or validated, there may no longer be a reason to retain them.

Questions of which data to keep and for how long need to be considered in the context of your being able to maintain the confidentiality of your subjects’ information, and should be planned in advance.

Writing a data management plan by Edina, University of Edinburgh, modified by Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/introduction.html

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Creative Commons Licence
PILOT by Imperial College London, modified by Marion Kelt, Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.