these meetings, the panel was mindful of its goal to provide helpful recommendations to the federal statistical agencies.

At a June 1991 meeting, several privacy advocates were invited. The meeting focused on the public's interest, ethical issues, and cognitive research on informed consent and notification in relation to confidentiality and data access concerns.

The Longitudinal Retirement History Workshop, chaired by Jerry A. Hausman and held on September 18–19, 1987, was conducted at the request of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Census Bureau. The National Center for Health Statistics provided additional support for the workshop.

The National Institute on Aging requested the workshop to help answer a question of whether its proposed reinterview of surviving panel members and spouses of decedents from the Longitudinal Retirement History Survey was feasible. Additional goals of the workshop were to learn some of the problems and issues in protecting confidential data, discuss the disclosure limitation practices of the Census Bureau, develop suggestions for methods to access confidential data for research, and provide information to NIA on how to achieve its goals while maintaining adequate protection of the data. Workshop participants were particularly interested in the legal, ethical, and policy questions surrounding the issues of recontacting the panel members, linking the data from the reinterview with the old data, and making the linked data files available to researchers for analysis.

After considering the questions above, the workshop participants outlined three possible courses of action. Two were deemed useful in a broad context: allowing access of researchers to microdata through their appointments as special sworn employees of the Census Bureau and the establishment of data resource centers where Census Bureau employees could process researcher requests. A third proposed course of action, one that was thought to be the most feasible for the follow-up of the Longitudinal Retirement History Survey, involved obtaining consent from the survey respondents to transfer data in existing files to another agency whose data are not subject to the conditions of Title 13 (see Chapter 5). The workshop participants also developed some ideas to help guide

Front Matter (R1-R14)

Executive Summary (1-14)

1 Principles and Problems (15-44)

2 The Framework of Study (45-60)

3 Data Subjects (61-90)

4 Data Users (91-108)

5 Legislation (109-140)

6 Technical and Administrative Procedures (141-180)

7 Statistical Data on Organizations (181-202)

8 Managing Confidentiality and Data Access Functions (203-218)

Recommendations (219-228)

References (229-242)

Appendix A: Study Procedures (243-258)

Appendix B: Biographical Sketches (259-265)

Index (266-274)