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Protecting Individual Privacy in Evaluation Research (1975) / Chapter Skim
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THE MEANS OF PROTECTING INDIVIDUAL PRIVACY IN EVALUATION RESEARCH
Pages 8-14

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From page 8...
... Hence, the risk of misuse is significant, and rules for handling information need to be carefully formulated and strictly enforced. The Committee feels strongly that every agency sponsoring evaluation research should have clear guidelines designed to minimize the risk of mishandling sensitive personal information.
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From page 9...
... The objectives of these procedures should be to reduce to an absolute minimum the number of people who have access to identified records and to make sure that these people are fully committed to honoring the pledge of confidentiality and subject to severe penalties if they do not. There have been relatively few problems of protecting identified information when evaluations have been carried out by federal employees and the data processed within a federal agency.
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From page 10...
... Such reanalysis is useful not only to get an independent check on the original evaluation, but also to use data collected for evaluation purposes to test additional hypotheses about human behavior. The information collected from families in the course of the New Jersey income maintenance experiment, for example, is not only useful in evaluating the particular income maintenance plans tried out in that experiment, but also provides a rich source of data on low income families that can be used to explore a variety of hypotheses about labor force participation, spending patterns, and other family economic behavior.
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From page 11...
... The experimenters negotiated with the prosecutor, offering to reimburse the government for any illegal overpayments rather than subject the respondents to prosecution and publicity, but in the end believed there were no valid legal grounds for resisting the subpoenas. At the same time, the Senate Finance Committee, which was debating welfare reform, became interested in the experiment and asked for identified individual family records.
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From page 12...
... The Committee has no desire to protect illegal activities or weaken the effectiveness of the courts or of the Congressional power of inquiry, but it believes that the benefits of fostering a free and honest flow of information from individuals to evaluators of public programs is worth the decrease in otherwise available data. It should be noted that this privilege would not deprive the courts or Congress of any substantial evidentiary resource currently available.
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From page 13...
... It has been argued that no statute is needed because the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press, which protects journalists from having to disclose their sources in court, by extension protects researchers from being compelled to disclose information gathered for research purposes, since one product of research is publication of the results. Without this extension, the basis for statutory protection of researchers would be very different from that for journalists, since protection of news sources derives from an explicit Constitutional guarantee and protection of research sources from only an implicit right of privacy.
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From page 14...
... It would be possible to draft a federal statute creating a research privilege that applied only to federal agency evaluation research and some members of the Committee would favor this course of action. Proponents of this position believe that it is far easier to demonstrate to legislators the public usefulness of federal evaluation research than of research in general.
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Key Terms

  • agency evaluation
  • identifying information
  • constitutional guarantee
  • serious consideration
  • evaluation purposes

  • identified individual
  • identifiable information
  • committee feels
  • information collected
  • confidential data

  • negative income
  • safeguarding identified
  • income maintenance
  • identified records
  • information gathered

  • illegal activities
  • income tax
  • bona fide
  • legal protection
  • shield statute

  • legal experts
  • privileged communication
  • feels strongly
  • severe penalties
  • work product

  • federal evaluation
  • evaluation results
  • sponsoring evaluation
  • future evaluation
  • distinguish evaluation


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