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Dear community members,

Some agencies make subject-level survey public based on complex surveys.

They often combine smaller ZCTA areas with their neighbors (however neighborhood is defined) to avoid "disclosure risk" (i.e. a subject becoming identifiable by combinations of variables).

Please let me know if you can recommend literature about the methods that tries to minimizes the disclosure risk.

Best,

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Ryung S. Kim
Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
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There's been extensive literature on the topic in the past 10-15 years. There are book-length treatments (http://www.amazon.com/Synthetic-Datasets-Statistical-Disclosure-Control/dp/1461403251; http://www.amazon.com/Statistical-Disclosure-Control-Anco-Hundepool/dp/1119978157); practices by federal agencies (https://www.census.gov/srd/sdc/); review articles (http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/76/1/163.abstract). Pick and choose.

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Stanislav Kolenikov
Principal Survey Scientist
Abt SRBI
Education Officer, Survey Research Methods Section