Announcements

Disclosure and Confidentiality Issues Workshop to be Held at GSA

On November 16, 2006, Myron Gutmann, James McNally, and JoAnne McFarland O'Rourke will host a preconference workshop on disclosure and confidentiality issues at the 59th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America in Dallas, Texas. the title of the workshop is "Preparing Gerontological Research Data for Archiving and Secondary Analysis: Best Practices for Protecting Respondent Confidentiality and Facilitating the Research Process."

Disclosure Risk Analysis Article Published in Ethics Journal

JoAnne McFarland O'Rourke of ICPSR, along with colleagues from the disclosure committee of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive (SAMHDA) at ICPSR, has published an article in the September 2006 issue of the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics (JERHRE). The article is titled, "Solving Problems of Disclosure Risk While Retaining Key Analytic Uses of Publicly Released Microdata." Coauthors are Stephen Roehrig of Carnegie Mellon University, Steven G. Heeringa of the Institute for Social Research's Survey Research Center, Beth Glover Reed and William C. Birdsall of the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan, and Margaret Overcashier and Kelly Zidar of ICPSR.

The article is available online.

Gutmann Coauthors Article on Confidentiality and Spatially Explicit Data

Myron Gutmann, ICPSR Director, is a coauthor of the article, "Confidentiality and Spatially Explicit Data: Concerns and Challenges," along with Leah VanWey, Ronald Rindfuss, Barbara Entwisle, and Deborah Balk. The article was published in the Oct. 25, 2005 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The article presents four sometimes conflicting principles for the conduct of ethical and high-quality science using such data: protection of confidentiality, the social-spatial linkage, data sharing, and data preservation. The conflict among these four principles is particularly evident in the display of spatially explicit data through maps combined with the sharing of tabular data files. The authors review these two research activities and show how current practices favor one of the principles over the others and do not satisfactorily resolve the conflict among them. Further basic research and open debate are needed to advance both understanding of and solutions to this dilemma. The article is available online.

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