New approaches to confidentiality protection: Synthetic data, remote access and research data centers

This paper describes a proposal to combine three approaches that will enable research access to high quality data while preserving confidentiality. These approaches are: developing synthetic microdata which can be accessed at a restricted access site (a virtual Research Data Center), together with access to the "gold standard" analytical data set through a Research Data Center network. It also describes the promise of the development of other datasets - particularly multiple public use files that can be created from the same underlying data that can be targeted at different audiences