Abstract
Linking survey data to external databases that contain records pertaining to the same respondents holds substantial promise for survey researchers. There are a number of methodological challenges with generating the links between the data sources, but there may also be administrative challenges in linking the datasets. This issue becomes particularly important when conducting cross-national research where research standards and requirements may vary substantially across countries. This chapter provides an overview of process of linking in a comparative context and highlights several issues that researchers are likely to encounter when conducting this type of work.
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The central legislative instrument of European data protection law is the “Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data.“ The Directive includes a minimum set of provisions to be implemented by the Member States and had to be transposed into national law by all EU Member States by the end of 1998. However, the Data Protection Directive (by definition) is not a self-executing legal instrument and therefore leaves the choice of form and methods to the national authorities. As a result, the provisions of the Directive have been implemented in different ways in the Member States, resulting in differences in the level of data protection, both on paper and in practice (Schmidutz et al. 2013).
References and Further Reading
Börsch-Supan, A., Brandt, M., Hunkler, C., Kneip, T., Korbmacher, J., Malter, F., Schaan, B., Stuck, S., & Zuber, S. (2013). Data resource profile: The Survey of Health. Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). International Journal of Epidemiology, 42(4), pp. 992–1001
Calderwood, L., & Lessof, C. (2009). Enhancing longitudinal surveys by linking to administrative data. In P. Lynn (Ed.), Methodology of Longitudinal Surveys (Pp. 55–72). New York: Wiley.
Korbmacher, J. M., & Schmidutz, D. (2015). A note on record linkage in SHARE. In F. Malter & A. Börsch-Supan (Eds.), SHARE Wave 5: Innovations & Methodology, MEA, Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy (Pp. 57–63). Munich.
Schmidutz, D., Ryan, L., Müller, G., De Smedt, A., & De Smedt, K. (2013). Report about new IPR challenges: Identifying ethics and legal challenges of SSH Research. Deliverable D6.2 of Data Service Infrastructure for the Social Sciences and Humanities (DASISH). Retrieved from: http://dasish.eu/deliverables/.
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Blom, A.G., Korbmacher, J. (2018). Linking Survey Data to Administrative Records in a Comparative Survey Context. In: Vannette, D., Krosnick, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Survey Research . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54395-6_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54395-6_34
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