Data privacy

General guidelines

Within ProFile, DZHW is implementing guidelines from two German interest groups of marketing and evaluation research which can be found here:

"Guidelines for Online Survey" of ADM (Arbeitskreis Deutscher Markt- und Sozialforschungsinstitute e.V.)
"Standards for Quality Assurance for Online Surveys" (ADM, ASI Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sozialwissenschaftlicher Institute e.V., BVM Berufsverband Deutscher Markt- und Sozialforscher e.V., und D.G.O.F. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Online-Forschung e.V.)

Data management at DZHW

Service for users and maintenance work are carried out by the DZHW staff.
The staff in this department receives special training provided by the respective data privacy official and is obliged to confidential data usage.

Data Storage

The DZHW receives contact data (name, gender, year of birth, discipline, e-Mail address) of doctoral candidates from the universities and other funding institutions for the purpose of inviting doctoral candidates to the ProFile survey. Furthermore, the DZHW uses the data to generate reference statistics about the total population.

Contact data is stored in a special database. If the attempt to contact a person is not successful, further research is undertaken in order to find new contact data and resend the invitation. In case of a second unsuccessful attempt the contact data of a person are anonymized. If a person does not respond to the invitation within 14 weeks their contact details will also be anonymized. In order to avoid data loss, in the case of system breakdown, backups are stored for a period of 365 days and then deleted.

The responses from the survey are stored in a separate database. Matching contact and survey data is possible only via a secure personal identifying number. With the help of this identifier a pseudonymous data record is created which constitutes the basis for analysis. Results of this data can be aggregated to an anonymous form which can then be published.

For persons participating in the ProFile panel contact data is stored for maintaining contact, keeping the panel and to avoid double invitations.

Storing contact data is necessary due to the specific research interest of ProFile. ProFile is interested in collecting information from the beginning to the end of the doctoral education. In addition, data about different career stages should enable examination of occupational outcomes in the long run. Only continuous data collection creates a valid empirical data base allowing to answer the specific questions of ProFile (cf. objectives and design).

Data analysis

When analyzing data we ensure that tracing back to individuals on grounds of results is not possible. Therefore, findings based on answers of less than six respondents are not displayed in publications or reports.

In addition to the scientific utilization, the responses from the survey are available for external researchers in the form of a scientific use file (SUF). A transmission of the contact data and dataset for commercial purposes, though, are not possible.

Results which are submitted to partners are processed along the requirements from anonymization. Our work is based on rules of good scientific practice, which were developed within the processing of official survey micro data as scientific use files.

Contact Person in Case of Questions

The compliance with regulations for the protection of your confidential data is supervised by the data protection official Martin Fuchs. Please contact Mr. Fuchs (+49 (0) 511 450 670-491 or ) for further questions regarding data protection.