LMIC

Research often requires the use of personally identifiable information (PII), which has strict ethical and legal guidelines on how it can be collected, analysed and used. For some data (such as health, gender identity or political interests), this is particularly problematic because they are ‘protected characteristics’ under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which means additional measures should be taken to ensure use is fair, appropriate and necessary.

This should not be a barrier to research. Although there are potentially many factors to consider, some basic principles and common frameworks do much of the heavy lifting.

Good data governance generally comes about when you have the time to think. However, the way you think about it will affect the outcome, and different disciplines may have different views.

Data governance involves ethics, data management, disclosure control, people management, public engagement and archiving policy. One common way to manage these different interests is a framework called the Five Safes (Ritchie, 2017). This framework is used extensively in health and social research, and we apply it thoughout this course. Below you can see the topics split up into each ‘Safe’.

These are the topics that are covered in the course: