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The North Carolina Education Research Data Center facilitates problem-focused research on education by
sharing data with qualified researchers.
The NCERDC data on students, teachers, and schools are available for research purposes only. Eligibility,
procedures for requesting access to the data, and data security requirements are described in the document
NCERDC Data Use Application and Agreement, and briefly outlined below:
Eligible Institutions and Researchers
Data can be released to: an institution of higher education, a non-profit research institution, or a government
agency with established protocols for an Institutional Review Board, Human Subjects Review Committee, or
equivalent body to review proposals for research projects employing sensitive data. Researchers requesting
NCERDC data must have their primary affiliation with an eligible institution, or be a currently enrolled student
in a doctoral program.
I. Procedures for Obtaining Data (Also see summary checklist below)
A. All Researchers:
All who use data from the Data Center will have to do the following, as described in the Data Use Agreement:
- Complete and sign the Data Use Agreement.
- Sign an Investigator confidentiality agreement.
- Ensure that their research assistants sign a confidentiality agreement and abide by the procedures for
protecting confidentiality of the data.
- Obtain their institution's IRB approval of their project (expedited or full review).
- Complete a Data Request form.
- Agree to send any paper to DPI and the Data Center before publication. Such papers include conference
presentations, accepted publications, and any press releases.
- Agree to provide the Data Center with an access fee to cover the administrative costs and personnel time
spent on project review, setting up accounts, and providing data files and documentation. The standard fee is
$1800, equivalent to two days of Data Center services. This fee also covers limited telephone and email
consultation to the investigator and/or research staff as to the origins, structure, and general content of the data files sent. This fee is waived for researchers who are doctoral candidates, and may occasionally be negotiated for faculty who are not able to obtain external funding for data acquisition. We encourage these researchers to seek funding sources within their universities, and will provide them with any materials that they may need for this process.
Requests for data customization will involve additional fees to compensate the Data Center for time that
personnel spend on the project. During the proposal review process, the Data Center will provide the researcher
with an estimate of the number of days of Data Center services required for customization.
B. Doctoral Students:
Student access to data is limited to doctoral candidates. These researchers must:
- Submit a proposal and complete all steps indicated in the Data Use Agreement.
- Have a faculty member sponsor that proposal by writing a letter of support, indicating that the faculty
member will assume responsibility for data security as stated in the Data Use Agreement.
- Due to resource constraints, students may have access only to existing datasets. The Data Center will not
customize data for dissertation research.
C. Grant-Proposal Writers:
Faculty members writing grant proposals will need information about the measures the Data Center has. For
any data set the Data Center receives or creates, the Data Center produces codebooks with detailed written
information about the data set and measures therein. Anyone who could become eligible to use the data may
have access to the codebooks and data dictionaries without going through the proposal process.
Any grant-proposal writer who would like access to the data sets will fulfill all requirements in section A above,
and the General Procedures for obtaining data
The Principal Investigator for the project will work with the Data Center Director to estimate the time involved
for the project and include that estimate as a line-item on the grant proposal budget.
II. Guidelines for Evaluating Proposals
Following the instructions in the Data Use Agreement, proposals should include a description of the project, the
data sets and measures required to address the project, the timeline of the analysis, and benefits to the Data
Center. If the project requires labor from the Data Center beyond providing existing data sets (e.g., creating
customized data sets), these activities must be described and justified in the proposal. Most proposals are 5-10
pages long.
Proposals should include an abstract (approx. 250 words) with the title of the project, names of investigators,
funding source (or proposed funding source). The abstract should state the goals of the project and the Data
Center’s role in meeting those goals. Proposals should include the data request form.
Data Center personnel will evaluate the quality and feasibility of proposals and ensure that different scholars do
not duplicate each other's efforts. The NCERDC also will set priorities for accommodating different projects
using the following guidelines.
A. Mission:
The NCERDC will give higher priority to proposals that meet State Board of Education priorities. Proposals
with a different focus are still eligible for data, but if all other factors are equal, proposals fitting the Data
Center’s goals of supporting research that is useful for education policy will have a higher priority. For a
description of the Data Center’s goals, please see the Report to the Spencer Foundation.
B. Geography:
The Spencer Foundation originally funded the North Carolina Education Research Consortium as part of its
Southern Initiative. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction is a partner in this effort. Therefore,
the Data Center will also give higher priority to research based in North Carolina. Giving priority to North
Carolina researchers does not prohibit others from using the data; we encourage collaboration with North
Carolina researchers, but also provide access to researchers from many different universities.
C. Benefit to the Data Center:
Benefits to the Data Center could include providing funds to the Data Center, providing new data sets to the
Data Center, enhancing the existing data by cleaning it or calculating derived variables, improving the
understanding of the data providing by documenting information about the data or validating the data against
other sources and giving that product to the Data Center.
D. Feasibility:
Projects that require substantial time investment from Data Center personnel may receive lower priority,
depending upon the Data Center’s schedule of commitments at the time that the proposal is submitted.
III. Different Kinds of Requests Researchers May Make of the Data Center
A. Existing Products
1. Codebooks:
The Data Center writes codebooks for each data set it receives or creates. These documents inform researchers about the data sets, but they do not contain confidential information nor do they allow researchers to manipulate or analyze the data. Therefore, people may have access to these documents without submitting a proposal to the NCERDC. However, for any other product, researchers must adhere to the procedures described above.
2. Data Sets:
The Data Center can accommodate requests for copies of data sets that currently exist in the Data Center. When a researcher’s application for using these data is approved, the NCERDC will provide access to the requested data through a secure server. Requests for additional years of data can be made as addenda to an approved
application. However, requests for additional data files may require submission of a new proposal.
B. New Products
1. Customized Data Sets:
A researcher might want the Data Center to merge, concatenate, or subset various existing files. Although this type of request requires some programming from the Data Center, it does not raise new confidentiality
concerns. However, a researcher who wants a customized data set will have to explain why it is necessary for the Data Center to alter the data sets rather than having the researcher alter the data sets. A fee for
customization may apply.
2. Creating New Data Sets Based on Matching Names or Social Security Numbers:
In this case, a researcher might conduct a survey of students in one school and want to match the survey to some of the Data Center data. This type of request raises additional confidentiality concerns because the researcher already knows the identity of the students. Such requests will only be considered if the researcher has documentation of consent to access student academic records, and the consent process is approved by the researcher’s IRB. If this condition is met, the Data Center will use identifying information from the researcher’s data to match that file to Data Center data and provide a dataset in which researchers are able only to identify their study participants.
If researchers wish to use only de-identified data on a sub-group of students, such as students enrolled in a specific curriculum program, we will request a file with the identifiers and a randomized ID for those students, match that file to the Data Center data, and return an encrypted file to the researcher that would not permit identifying individual students from the sub-group of interest. Then, the researcher will use that encrypted file to conduct studies. Requests of this type, without documented consent, will be considered on a case by case basis and reviewed carefully for confidentiality concerns.
All researchers will have signed the Researcher Confidentiality Agreement in which they promise not to try to identify any individual. This type of project is the most labor-intensive for the Data Center to undertake and will require the researcher to offset Data Center costs.
IV. Requirements for Using the Data Center Data: Summary Checklist
- Signed Data Use Agreement and confidentiality agreements for the Principal Investigator and all research
assistants.
- IRB approval from the Principal Investigator's institution.
- Completed proposal for use of the data, including the data security plan and statement of benefits for the Data Center.
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Agreement to give copies of all research products to the Data Center and to the Department of Public
Instruction.
- Compensation of the Data Center for access to the data and time spent on the project by Data Center
personnel.
- For students only - Faculty sponsorship of the proposal, indicated by a letter of reference.
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