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Purpose and data

Project purpose

Your project will have research questions and/or objectives that will determine the scope and purpose of your project.  How you choose to formulate these questions will determine what kinds of research data you need to gather. If you plan to work with certain data, this can also help you adapt your research questions.

Personal data

Personal data is all information that can be linked to someone who can be identified, directly or indirectly.

Personal data includes information like name, contact information, IP address, voice recordings, and signed consent forms. In addition, combinations of background information that can identify an individual are also personal data. For example, age, sex, and postal code is often enough to identify individuals. If you have interview transcripts where you have removed all identifying information, but you still have a list of participants – often called a connection key, both the transcripts and the connection key are considered personal data.

When working with personal data, there are both laws and internal guidelines that must be followed. These include the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Norway’s personal data act, and VID’s Guidelines for the processing of personal data in research and student theses. One of the principles of these laws is data minimization, which means we should only process personal data if necessary and we shouldn’t gather more data than necessary. Need to know, not nice to know.

Data protection laws apply when personal data are processed. Processing is everything you do with personal data in your project, from collecting to transferring to transcribing to deleting. As long as you have any personal data – including signed consent forms or a connection key – you are processing personal data.

Special categories of personal data

There are certain topics that, by law (personvernforordningen art. 9 nr. 1), require extra protection. They are called special categories of personal data and can only be collected if they are necessary for the purpose of your research. If you are collecting data on these topics and that data can be connected to individuals, your data will require extra care:

Health data, Ethnicity, Political opinions, Religious belief, Philosophical beliefs, Sex life, Genetic data, Biometric data, Union Membership, Criminal offences.

Data reuse

You can avoid collecting personal data by reusing datasets. You can use international services like Google Dataset Search, BASE, and DataCite to search for relevant datasets. There are also several Norwegian sources of data that you can use, some of which are outlined below.

  • Helsedata.no helps you find data sources and apply for access to health information for research, health analysis, quality work in the health services, editorial work, development of pharmaceuticals or other health-related projects.
  • DataverseNO is a national archive for open data operated by UiT where you can find reuseable data.
  • Sikt "has extensive collections with data about people and society." This includes European Social Survey (ESS), a cross-national survey with data from 38 countries, and Norwegian Research Data.
  • A collaboration between Sikt and OsloMet, SurveyBanken provides access to data from 3,000 surveys since 1957 on themes including climate, politics, and youth.
  • Researchers can request access to data from health registries and health studies from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (FHI).
  • Statistics Norway (SSB) collects data on the economy, population and society at national, regional and local levels.

Collecting anonymous data

Anonymous data cannot in any way or at any point in the project be traced back to individuals, directly or indirectly. There are several ways to collect data anonymously.

For interviews, you can take written notes instead of recording voices. When making observations, it is wise to roughly categorize information in your notes rather than specifying it. You can also conduct an anonymous survey on paper or digitally using the Nettskjema tool (see UiO’s guide for ensuring anonymity in Nettskjema).

Sikt has guidance on carrying out a project without processing personal data.