ORCA values the privacy of respondents and treats all data highly sensitive, with the highest professional standards for security and confidentiality. Protecting the confidentiality of survey respondents is of paramount importance and ORCA takes serious measures to ensure that privacy is maintained.
To maximize data confidentiality and participant protection in the project, all project staff are trained in the ethics of data collection and the importance of confidentiality. No identifying information is collected from participants (with the exception of the written informed consent), and all data is kept confidential. Personal identifiable information is recorded on written consent forms, and consent forms are linked to study participants using a randomly assigned unique identifier. Identifiers other than the randomly selected unique identifier are not entered into any study databases used for analysis.
IDIs and FGDs are audio recorded and transcribed, but staff ensure that information that enable identification is not included in transcribed data. Audio files are kept in password-protected folders to which only senior project personnel (PI, co-investigators, and project managers) have access. Recordings are destroyed following transcription. Transcripts include no identifying information. All project participants are informed of these measures to ensure confidentiality.
All data collected is stored on secure computers and transferred to an external hard drive by IT staff for back-up; the external hard-drive are password protected and encrypted. Under no circumstances, passwords for the encrypted data are shared with anyone other than the project team. Only anonymized data is transferred to our clients via password-protected and encrypted files.
