New Data Dissemination Approaches in Old Europe: Synthetic Data Sets for a German Establishment Survey

• Activity Number: 611
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 5, 2010 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Joerg Drechsler*+
• Companies: Institute for Employment Research
• Keywords: Confidentiality ; IAB Establishment Panel ; multiple imputation ; partially synthetic ; variance-inflated imputation model

Abstract

Disseminating microdata to the public that provide a high level of data utility while at the same time guaranteeing the confidentiality of the survey respondent is a difficult task. Generating multiply imputed synthetic datasets is an innovative statistical disclosure limitation technique with the potential of enabling the data disseminating agency to achieve this twofold goal. In this talk we present the first successful implementation of this approach outside the U.S.: The generation of partially synthetic datasets for a German establishment survey, the IAB Establishment Panel. We describe the evolution of the project from the imputation of the missing values in the original survey and the discussions which variables to synthesize to the final synthesis. We also present our disclosure risk evaluations and provide some first results on the data utility of the generated datasets.