Precise, accurate spatial data are contributing to a revolution in some fields of social science. Improved access to such data about individuals, groups, and organizations makes it possible for researchers to examine questions they could not otherwise explore, gain better understanding of human behavior in its physical and environmental contexts, and create benefits for society from the knowledge flows from new types of scientific research. However, to the extent that data are spatially precise, there is a corresponding increase in the risk of identification of the people or organizations to which the data apply. With identification comes a risk of various kinds of harm to those identified and the compromise of promises of confidentiality made to gain access to the data. This report focuses on the opportunities and challenges that arise when accurate and precise spatial data on research participants, such as the locations of their homes or workplaces, are linked to personal information they have provided under promises of confidentiality.

The availability of these data makes it possible to do valuable new kinds of research that links information about the external environment to the behavior and values of individuals. Among many possible examples, such research can explore how decisions about health care are made, how young people develop healthy lifestyles, and how resource-dependent families in poorer countries spend their time obtaining the energy and food that they need to survive. The linkage of spatial and social information, like the growing linkage of socioeconomic characteristics with biomarkers (biological data on individuals), has the potential to revolutionize social science and to significantly advance policy making. While the availability of linked social-spatial data has great promise for research, the locational information makes it possible for a secondary user of the linked data to identify the participant and thus break the promise of confidentiality made when the social data were collected. Such a user could also discover additional information about the research participant, without asking for it, by linking to geographically coded information from other sources. Open public access to linked social and high-resolution spatial data greatly increases the risk of breaches of confidentiality. At the same time, highly restrictive forms of data management and dissemination carry very high costs: by making it prohibitively difficult for researchers to gain access to data or by restricting or altering the data so much that they are no longer useful for answering many types of important scientific questions.

CONCLUSIONS

CONCLUSION 1: Recent advances in the availability of social-spatial data and the development of geographic information systems (GIS) and related techniques to manage and analyze those data give researchers important new ways to study important social, environmental, economic, and health... [ Read More (0.8k in body) ]