Use of Administrative Records and the Privacy-Confidentiality Trade-off

The paper by Gerald Gates provides a comprehensive review of how privacy and confidentiality concerns have hampered the use of administrative records in the production and analyses of national statistics. Privacy and confidentiality concerns can affect multiple aspects of the process—from obtaining the needed records to providing access to micro data files. Even though the use of administrative records (either as substitutes for other sources of data or in addition to these other sources) improves the quality of statistics and is cost efficient, problems in any phase of data collection, storage, processing, or release can greatly reduce the likelihood that administrative records will become part of the core production of national statistics. Gates’s paper provides an excellent summary of privacyand confidentialityrelated challenges and goes on to suggest a range of research activities to address them.