Abstract #301275

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JSM 2003 Abstract #301275
Activity Number: 285
Type: Topic Contributed
Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2003 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: Section on Government Statistics
Abstract - #301275
Title: Why Disclosure Analyses for Microdata Do Not Always Involve Black-and-White Decisions
Author(s): Alvan O. Zarate*+
Companies: National Center for Health Statistics
Address: 6525 Belcrest Rd. Rm 1170, Hyattsville, MD, 20782-2003,
Keywords: disclosure review ; microdata files ; public use files ; confidentiality protection
Abstract:

General lack of understanding of how decisions are made concerns what information is microdata files. The research community and others want as much detail as possible, while confidentiality considerations mitigate against this. A third group questions why we cannot make absolute statements of protection. This paper explores approaches to the assessment of disclosure risk in microdata files and the levels of detail permissible, types of "trade-offs" that must be made, with respect to key variables, considerations of how protection against intrusion is to be achieved and why it is usually difficult to quantify the amount of risk run by any given file. It also considers the difficulties with the use of general "rules of thumb" such as the 100,000 rule for community size and the n=x rule for cell size.

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