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Sharing Research Data (1985) / Chapter Skim
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Definitions, Products, Distinctions in Data Sharing
Pages 89-122

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From page 89...
... In practice there are, of course, a great many variations on this theme. Some of the variations are suggested by the factors that influence data sharing and its products.
From page 90...
... The expected products of data sharing will not always appear, of course, and may not fulfill their purposes when they do. For example, poor research can often be identified from reports or tables, reducing the need for access to raw data.
From page 91...
... for research purposes. Susan Long's professional interest lies partly in examining consolidated administrative data and IRS procedures manuals to determine how administrative discretion is used in applying tax law, i.e., how rate of audits varies by geographic region, income level of the taxpayer, etc.
From page 92...
... The uses of administrative records in public health research are sufficient to justify an annual conference on records and statistics that is sponsored by the National Center for Health Statistics and other agencies. Access to administrative records for research purposes can be at least as important as sharing data originally collected for research purposes, but it raises different problems.
From page 93...
... (1981) analysis of the relative effectiveness of private and public schools are part of a national longitudinal study of high school students conducted for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
From page 94...
... The Materials Properties Data Center stores and disseminates machine-readable data on tests on metals and ceramics to government, commercial, and academic users through a facility at Battelle Laboratories, and analogous on-line facilities are under development by the Copper Development Association, the Materials Properties Council, and others (see National Research Council, 1980~. The National Bureau of Standards has a major brokerage role in these and in the Fundamental Particle Data Center, Diffusion in Metals Center, the Data Center for Atomic Transition Probabilities, and the Crystal Data Center, to which physical scientists and engineers contnbute.
From page 95...
... The National Geophysical and Solar Terrestrial Data Center archives and distributes data relating to solid earth physics, e.g., volcanoes and earthquakes, geothermics, etc. The National Geodetic Survey Information Center distributes mapping information in machine-readable and other forms to federal, state, and local agencies and .
From page 96...
... Similar lists are issued by operating agencies for special user groups, e.g., the Directory of Federal Agency Education Data Tapes (Mooney, 19791. The problem of maintaining useful inventories of data tapes that can be shared is complicated and severe enough to have received the attention of President Carter's Reorganization Project on the Federal Statistical System.
From page 97...
... International organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and UNESCO have begun to try to establish guidelines on data sharing. International exchanges are not uncommon in engineenng, to judge from the American Society for Metals/National Bureau of Standards joint effort on data sharing for construction of alloy phase diagrams.
From page 98...
... Census Bureau. In still other cases, the data may be made available as summary statistics, obtained from a facility that analyzes the raw data according to prescription of the data requester, e.g., some research on Social Security Administration files (Alexander and Jabine, 1978)
From page 99...
... Statistical strategies include those used in initial data collection, e.g., randomized response, contamination, response aggregation methods, and so ameliorate problems of later data distribution. They also include methods used in the data distribution process to protect against deductive disclosure of information about identifiable individuals based on nominally anonymous records.
From page 100...
... More important perhaps, the current laws are fragmented, covering special areas such as criminal justice or mental health research; the Census Bureau, the Social Security Administration, and a few other agencies have different specialized statutes. Bills to ensure individual privacy and researcher access, such as He proposed Privacy of Research Records Act, would help to make the law more uniform, but not much work is being done on them.
From page 101...
... A number of agencies regularly include provision for construction of public-use data tapes in contracts for surveys, e.g., the National Center for Education Statistics (see below)
From page 102...
... The American Chemical Society journals, which include many articles by authors in the private sector, make data supplements available to permit independent appraisal of conclusions in published articles. Contributions by commercial laboratories to cooperative efforts, such as the American Society for Metals/National Bureau of Standards alloy phase diagram project, reflect Me same spirit.
From page 103...
... As noted above, some data from independent laboratories, including commercial ones, are pooled for common use in the alloy phase diagram project of the American Society for Metals/National Bureau of Standards, in the Materials Properties Data Center, in some American Chemical Society journals, and others. On the other hand, evidence on toxic chemicals, radiation, pollution risks, and other sensitive topics have often been difficult to obtain.
From page 104...
... more generally, supported by the National Institute of Education; research supported by Me Agency for Children, Youth, and Families that involves pooling different data sets in the interest of understanding child and family support systems; grants for secondary analyses of publicly supported research by private foundations such as the Russell Sage Foundation, e.g., Rossi and Lyall (1976) on the New Jersey negative income tax experiments and Cook et al.
From page 105...
... The following briefly describes a few cases and the lessons Hat might be drawn from them. Sociology and Education: Public and Private Schools High School and Beyond is a longitudinal study of students based on a national probability sample, conducted for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
From page 106...
... The controversy appears to have spurred faster partial analyses of published statistics, notably on adequacy of sample size, on measures of academic achievement, and at least one competing analysis of the raw data (Page and Keith, 19811. There seems to be good argument for contracting for several simultaneous competing analyses for such policy-sensitive cases.
From page 107...
... Feldstein assisted in discovery of the error by making available both published and unpublished reports to Leimer and Lesnoy, as indeed he should, and provided advice and reactions to the authors' questions about why their results differed from his (Leimer and Lesnoy, 1980~. The authors also went a couple of steps beyond Feldstein's original analysis with corrected data to ensure that the analyses are not sensitive to plausible alternative conclusions, and those steps are distinctive.
From page 108...
... The contaminant had indeed been used for virus research in the same laboratory. An independent audit of the work undertaken by the hospital research staff also confirmed that three of the four cell lines were nonhuman, the third being human but not clearly linked to Hodgkin's disease tumors (Harris et al., 19811.
From page 109...
... , and in Project Talent, at least 10 percent have appeared as graduate theses or dissertations. Some special training programs and short courses are built around a particular data set: e.g., NSF has sponsored competing analyses of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Walberg et al., 1981a, 1981b)
From page 110...
... In educational research, Moskowitz and Wortman (1981) have reanalyzed the Riverside School desegregation data on reading achievement of MexicanAmencan children, and their results agreed with the original analyses, despite multiple analyses with more sophisticated methods.
From page 111...
... and creation of vehicles for sharing, such as the Material Properties Data Center and the American Society for Metals/National Bureau of Standards alloy phase diagram project, discussed above. The panel's 1980 report suggests that there is strong interest among industries, government, and academic research institutes in having access to data on mechanical properties of metals and ceramics.
From page 112...
... The alloy phase diagram program is a joint venture of the American Society for Metals and the National Bureau of Standards. It is dedicated to acquiring, evaluating, and distributing data on microstructural change in alloys as a function of temperature and alloy composition, the data being summarized in standardized phase diagrams.
From page 113...
... The interagency linkage study conducted by the Census Bureau, Social Security Administration, and Internal Revenue Service illustrates the type, though sharing is confined to the federal agencies; the same is true for some program evaluations in health care and social welfare (Boruch and Cecil, 19791. In social research, the purpose of combining data sets often is for policy research.
From page 114...
... on the international educational assessment, and related products issued by the NRC medical follow-up study, Project Talent, Northwestern's Project on Secondary Analysis, etc. Logs sometimes maintained by datasharing institutions, such as those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress and National Center for Education Statistics, on requests for tape files, documentation, etc., constitute a major vehicle for tracing further products and their utilization (see Peng et al., 19771.
From page 115...
... that many articles are not written so that the work can be repeated." 3. The time-genes data underlying Feldstein's work and used by Leimer and Lesnoy are accessible in published statistical abstracts, e.g., Annual Statistical Supplement to the Social Security Bulletin, Handbook of Labor Statistics, Current Population Reports of the Census Bureau, and others (see Leimer and IRsnoy, 1980, Appendices D and E)
From page 116...
... Battelle Columbus Laboratories, Mechanical Properties Data Center 1980b Descriptive brochure. Battelle, Columbus, Ohio.
From page 117...
... 1981 Private and Public Schools: Report to the National Center for Education Statistics. National Opinion Research Center, Chicago.
From page 118...
... San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Federal Energy Administration, Regulatory Institutions Office 1976 Experiment Guidelines for Electric Utility Demonstration Projects.
From page 119...
... 1979 The Mechanical Properties Data Center and numeric on line information systems.
From page 120...
... Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger. National Bureau of Standards, Alloy Data Center 1980a ASM/NBS Alloy Phase Diagram Program.
From page 121...
... Taylor, M.E., Stafford, C.E., and Place, C 1981 National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 Stay Reports Update: Review andAnnotation.
From page 122...
... Pierre, R.G. 1978 The first year of the education voucher demonstration: a secondary analysis of student achievement scores.


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