Handling Sensitive Data in Social Sciences and Humanities: Researchers' Questions, Legal and Ethical Considerations

In the course of their support activities for research data management, the Universities of Basel and Bern were repeatedly confronted with questions on the protection of sensitive qualitative data in the Humanities and Social Sciences, including anonymisation, secure data storage, and informed consent. In the context of a changing legal framework (EU GDPR, 2018; ongoing revision of Swiss data protection legislation), we felt the need to address these topics, to gain expertise on legal and ethical issues and most of all learn more about the concerns of researchers. In an inter-university collaboration we organized a one-day-workshop (May 2019), bringing together researchers, IT staff, legal experts, data protection and information security officers and RDM support staff. The workshop was based on the researchers' projects and their specific questions on dealing with sensitive data. The poster shows the workshop programm, frequently asked questions and lessons learned