Legal and Ethical Issues

This project seeks to identify legal requirements and ethical issues occurring at different stages of the research process in social science survey research and to compile and systematise all relevant information from the data collection phase through to the phases of data dissemination and long-run data preservation. Taking into account the various types of data being recorded in modern surveys such as SHARE, the project aims to define guidelines for appropriate data protection measures and to develop standards for procedures requiring legal and ethical consideration (such as data linkage procedures) in order to enable survey researchers to cope with the legal and ethical challenges resulting from data integration and linking. Besides the collection and systematisation of information on ethical guidelines/frameworks and legal provisions in the EU Member States, the creation of templates for letters and communication (e.g. with ethics committees), model contracts for the involved partners (e.g. with the survey agencies) and generic fieldwork-materials (such as consent forms and information leaflets) as well as the investigation of appropriate procedures for research data access are part of this project.