Data Privacy Survey

About

In the second quarter of 2022, Utrecht University (UU) Research Data Management Support (RDM Support) sent out a survey among all scientific personnel at Utrecht University, and organised one-on-one meetings with a selection of them. The aim of these efforts was to investigate 1) How UU researchers currently deal with personal data in their research, 2) What challenges they run into when handling personal data in research, and 3) How support at UU can improve their services concerning personal data in research.

The survey and one-on-one meetings were part of the Data Privacy Project, an RDM Support project to improve information, tools and services surrounding personal data in research.

Results report Recommendations report

This repository

This repository contains the documentation, code, fake survey data and the two reports written about the survey.

Documentation can be found in the documentation folder of this repository. It contains:

• The full survey in text and as Qualtrics export.
• The survey's privacy statement.
• The survey's Data Management Plan.
• The invitation sent out to researchers to meet one-on-one.
• The codes used to score open text responses and meeting notes.
• A codebook of the online survey in .csv format.

Code can be found in the src folder of this repository:

• pseudonymise-data.R reads in the raw data and cleans it up to create a pseudonymised version. It writes the pseudonymised data into the data/pseud folder (not publicly available). If the cleaned dataset passes the (limited) k-anonymity checks, it is written to the data/processed folder instead.
• plot-data.R contains all code needed to create the Results report.
• create-codebook.R contains code to create the codebook.
• data-privacy-survey-report.Rmd is the file underlying the published Results report. It loads the plot-data.R script to create all visualisations.
• data-privacy-survey-recommendations.Rmd is the file underlying the Recommendations report.

As the dataset contains personal information (demographic information, open text responses, email addresses, etc.), and no consent was obtained to share those details, we are unable to share the dataset in this repository. Instead, we created fake data files, which can be used to reproduce the Results report.

The two reports written about the survey are the following:

• The Results report describes the methodology and full results, both for the entire Utrecht University as well as the separate faculties.
• The Recommendations report summarises the results and provides Recommendations to improve privacy-related support for Utrecht University researchers.

Contact and contribution

For questions about this repository, please contact Utrecht University's Research Data Management Support, or open an Issue or Pull request in this repository.

License and citation

This repository is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license. You can view the license text here.

When using materials from this repository, please cite us as specified in https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7253451.