Ensuring anonymity in survey panel research

Abstract

In survey panel research, anonymity of the participants is of great importance, as it must be ensured to prevent negative effects of participation as well as to maintain trust that the sensitive data that respondents provide is handled with care. Measures have been developed in the disclosure control literature to provide estimates for re-identification risk in a dataset. Applying them to survey research is not straightforward as most methods that have been developed do handle missing data properly. Here, a new method is applied that closely matches a realistic scenario of an attempt of re-identification for survey research. This method can be applied to assess re-identification risk in survey research.