All Outputs (39)

Using the five safes to structure economic evaluations of data governance (2024)
Journal Article

As the world has become more digitally-dependent, questions of data governance such as ethics, institutional arrangements and statistical protection measures have increased in significance. Understanding the economic contribution of investments in da... Read More about Using the five safes to structure economic evaluations of data governance.

The inadvertently revealing statistic: A systemic gap in statistical training? (2024)
Journal Article

While concerns around data privacy are well-known, there's a lack of awareness and training when it comes to the confidentiality risk of published statistics, argue Ben Derrick, Elizabeth Green, Felix Ritchie, Jim Smith, Paul White

Machine learning models in trusted research environments - Understanding operational risks (2023)
Journal Article

IntroductionTrusted research environments (TREs) provide secure access to very sensitive data for research. All TREs operate manual checks on outputs to ensure there is no residual disclosure risk. Machine learning (ML) models require very large amou... Read More about Machine learning models in trusted research environments - Understanding operational risks.

Using pedagogical and psychological insights to train analysts using confidential data (2023)
Journal Article

With researchers increasingly gaining access to confidentiality data through restricted environments, interest has grown in the training of those researchers to protect confidentiality and to use the secure facility effectively. Researcher training,... Read More about Using pedagogical and psychological insights to train analysts using confidential data.

The present and future of the Five Safes framework (2023)
Journal Article

The Five Safes has become the default framework for confidential data governance across multiple sectors and countries. Since its inception in 2003, the approach has influenced data management in many ways, particularly in the public sector. As it ha... Read More about The present and future of the Five Safes framework.

The perils of pre-filling: Lessons from the UK's Annual Survey of Hours and Earning microdata (2023)
Journal Article

The role of the National Statistical Institution (NSI) is changing, with many now making microdata available to researchers through secure research environments This provides NSIs with an opportunity to benefit from the methodological input from rese... Read More about The perils of pre-filling: Lessons from the UK's Annual Survey of Hours and Earning microdata.

Not just arms and legs: Employer perspectives on student workers (2022)
Journal Article

The student workforce plays a substantial part in several low-paying industries such as retail and hospitality, and this has grown over time. However, there has been little recent research. The usual assumption is that students compete successfully w... Read More about Not just arms and legs: Employer perspectives on student workers.

10 is the safest number that there's ever been (2022)
Journal Article

When checking frequency and magnitude tables for disclosure risk, the cell threshold (the minimum number of observations in each cell) is a crucial parameter. In rules-based environments, this is a hard limit on what can or can't be published. In pri... Read More about 10 is the safest number that there's ever been.

A marriage of convenience: How employers and students working in hospitality view the employment relationship (2022)
Journal Article

Since the 1990s, the hospitality industry has been increasingly characterized by temporary and insecure forms of employment, a development, which has coincided with rising numbers of students seeking part-time employment. This provides increased job... Read More about A marriage of convenience: How employers and students working in hospitality view the employment relationship.

Measuring the value of data governance in agricultural investments: A case study (2022)
Journal Article

Summary The study at hand measures the value of improving data governance and access in the Supporting Soil Health Interventions (SSHI) project in Ethiopia. We applied two separate but interlinked models, one qualitative and one quantitative, to crea... Read More about Measuring the value of data governance in agricultural investments: A case study.

Automatic Checking of Research Outputs (ACRO): A tool for dynamic disclosure checks (2021)
Journal Article

This paper discusses the issues surrounding the creation of an automatic tool to reduce the burden of output checking in research environments. It describes ACRO (Automatic Checking of Research Outputs), a Stata tool written as a proof-of-concept, an... Read More about Automatic Checking of Research Outputs (ACRO): A tool for dynamic disclosure checks.

Measuring the value of improving data governance and access in Gates Foundation programme: A case study of the Supporting Soil Health Interventions in Ethiopia projects (2021)
Journal Article

The Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI) and the Open Data Institute (ODI) commissioned a team of economists to measure the value of improving data governance and access in the Supporting Soil Health Interventions in Ethiopia (S... Read More about Measuring the value of improving data governance and access in Gates Foundation programme: A case study of the Supporting Soil Health Interventions in Ethiopia projects.

Microdata access and privacy: What have we learned over twenty years? (2021)
Journal Article

Felix Ritchie reflects on lessons learned in twenty years of microdata access in the UK and Canada. Based on his contribution to the panel on "Privacy And Microdata Access: Two Worlds Colliding?" at the October 2020 Canadian Research Data Centre Netw... Read More about Microdata access and privacy: What have we learned over twenty years?.

Financial resilience, income dependence and organisational survival in UK charities (2021)
Journal Article

The financial well-being of the charity sector has important social implications. Numerous studies have analysed whether the concentration of income in a few sources increases financial vulnerability. However, few studies have systematically consider... Read More about Financial resilience, income dependence and organisational survival in UK charities.

Runners, repeaters, strangers and aliens: Operationalising efficient output disclosure control (2020)
Journal Article

Statistical agencies and other government bodies increasingly use secure remote research facilities to provide access to sensitive data for research and analysis by internal staff and third parties. Such facilities depend on human intervention to ens... Read More about Runners, repeaters, strangers and aliens: Operationalising efficient output disclosure control.

User-focused threat identification for anonymised microdata (2019)
Journal Article

© 2019 - IOS Press and the authors. When producing anonymised microdata for research, national statistics institutes (NSIs) identify a number of 'risk scenarios' of how intruders might seek to attack a confidential dataset. This approach has been cri... Read More about User-focused threat identification for anonymised microdata.

The five safes of risk-based anonymization (2019)
Journal Article

The sharing of data for the purposes of data analysis and research can have many benefits. At the same time, concerns and controversies about data ownership and data privacy elicit significant debate. So how do we utilize data in a way that protects... Read More about The five safes of risk-based anonymization.

Analyzing the disclosure risk of regression coefficients (2019)
Journal Article

A major growth area in social science research this century has been access to highly sensitive confidential microdata, often via restricted-access remote facilities. These allow researchers highly unlimited access to manipulate the data but with che... Read More about Analyzing the disclosure risk of regression coefficients.

Spontaneous recognition: An unnecessary control on data access? (2017)
Journal Article

Social scientists increasingly expect to have access to detailed data for research purposes. As the level of detail increases, data providers worry about “spontaneous recognition”, the likelihood that a microdata user believes that he or she has acci... Read More about Spontaneous recognition: An unnecessary control on data access?.

Measuring compliance with minimum wages (2017)
Journal Article

© 2017 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved. Identifying genuine underpayment of minimum wages is not straightforward. Some well-known statistical issues affect the measurement of compliance rates, but factors such as processing or behavi... Read More about Measuring compliance with minimum wages.