Tanvi Desai and Aidan Condron, ADRN

The Administrative Data Research Network (ADRN) is a UK-wide partnership between universities, government departments and agencies, national statistics authorities, the third sector, funders and researchers. We facilitate access to de-identified administrative data, providing a bespoke service for academic and government researchers so they can carry out social and economic research using administrative data − research which has the potential to benefit society. The ADRN was set up on the recommendation of the Administrative Data Taskforce, is supported by the department for Business Innovation and Skills, and funded by the ESRC. As preparation for the setting up the ADRN the ESRC undertook a public engagement exercise to identify key concerns around the reuse of UK citizens’ administrative data for research. This presentation will outline the findings of the public engagement exercise and provide an overview of the ADRN giving information on the background, structure, and access procedures and requirements. The talk will focus on the governance and procedures implemented within the ADRN to address public concerns and other ethical challenges of making linked administrative data available for research.

The Big Data Research Support (BDNS) supports the ESRC-funded Big Data Network (BDN2).  Our interests and responsibilities are in facilitating big data for social science by providing training, secure access to big data sets and developing big data management, analysis, and visualisation tools.  We are interested in wider engagement with the big data social scientific research community, particularly within UK universities. The talk sketches our projects and objectives, outline data sets we are working with and hope to make accessible to the wider research community in the future.  We are very interested in feedback and open to suggestions to what BDNS can do to support your work.