We spoke with Robert Osley-Thomas, Census Administrator at the WiscRDC, to learn more about the WiscRDC and how they support researchers.
Can you tell us a little bit about the WiscRDC? Its history, purpose, and services?
The Wisconsin Census Research Data Center (WiscRDC) provides Wisconsin researchers the opportunity to perform statistical analysis on non-public Census microdata in a secure computing environment. Through the WiscRDC controlled environment, researchers with approved projects are able to analyze censuses and surveys from the U.S. Census Bureau, health data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and a growing collection of other data resources from across the federal government, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureaus of Economic Analysis.
Census RDCs are located at many Research 1 Universities, including Stanford, Minnesota, Penn, and Texas A&M. Since the WiscRDC first opened here in fall 2015, it has been typically used by graduate students and faculty members from the following departments: Agricultural & Applied Economics, Economics, Sociology, Business, Population Health Sciences, and Social Work. But the WiscRDC is open to any researcher in Wisconsin.
Can you tell us a little bit about your role as the Administrator of the WiscRDC?
On the front end, I help researchers understand the availability of data and help them apply for data access. Once a project is approved I provide badges and lab orientations. I also help researchers work through the disclosure analysis needed to disclose research results. We provide researchers with access to restricted data, however researchers are only allowed to release results that do not reveal the identity of individual and firm respondents. To avoid disclosing confidential information, researchers can only release statistical coefficients and these statistical coefficients must have samples large enough that sample members cannot be identified. For example, if a researcher is studying high-income residents of Wisconsin small towns, researchers must use a sample that is large enough to represent the identities of these residents. Before researchers can release results, they must conduct disclosure analysis to ensure that their research samples are large enough. I help them with this.
What are some of the resources at the WiscRDC? Can you give an example of how researchers use the WiscRDC?
Our restricted data is our main resource; it doesn’t exist anywhere else. Restricted data has major advantages for a few reasons:
- Economic datasets that are not publicly available at the micro level
- More detailed level of geographic identifiers
- Much less top-coding
- Restricted variables (e.g., birthdate) Census datasets can be linked together and to external data
Researchers are only allowed to access our restricted data in the lab at the WiscRDC. The lab is a secure facility that researchers access with a badge. In the lab, we provide access to statistical software: SAS, Stata, R, Matlab, etc. for researchers. For examples of how researchers use the data at the WiscRDC, please view the researcher profiles of Marguerite Burns and Martin Ganco.
The WiscRDC makes restricted data available to researchers. Does the WiscRDC implement processes to ensure ethical use of this data? If so, how?
Researchers are obligated to protect the confidentiality of survey and census respondents forever. Researchers that release confidential data face potential jail time and substantial fines. As mentioned above, before releasing any results, we mandate that researchers conduct disclosure analysis to ensure that their samples are large enough.
What does sharing of data, reproducibility of data and preservation of data look like at the WiscRDC?
We are open to data sharing in the sense of “access to the datasets.” The data is accessible to researchers as long as they apply and get approved. We are concerned with reproducibility and preservation of data when it comes to other researchers who are interested in trying to reproduce results from a former research project that used our datasets. They can apply, just like anyone else, to access our datasets.
Any last words/comments you want to say?
Due to COVID-19, we have been closed since quarantine started in mid-March, but we are now open again! We’re trying to let campus know about the WiscRDC, to get researchers into our doors. If you have any questions/concerns about the WiscRDC, please contact me, Robert Thomas at robert.r.thomas@census.gov.