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Use of Publicly Available OR Identifiable Private Sources of Information

In many areas of the social sciences, one of the most commonly used methods of research is the secondary analysis of publicly available files of data. The federal government as well as large data consolidation bureaus and consortiums provide public access to many data sets. Additionally, many federal funding programs as well as social science professional organizations and journals now require that researchers make the data they collect publicly available to encourage scholarly replication of research. Data may also available from previously IRB approved protocols where the data sets do not contain information that could be used to identify individual research participants.