FERPA
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. To the extent that The University of Texas at Dallas Education Research Center (UTD-ERC) brings together individual level student data, the relevance of FERPA is obvious.
Even though the UTD-ERC only receives de-identified data (i.e., no names, birth dates, or social security numbers), given that small cell sizes can potentially identify individual students, the importance of ensuring compliance with FERPA cannot be over stated.
The contractual obligations that are required to ensure this compliance are included in the confidentiality agreement that every researcher must sign before gaining access to ERC data. In general, to ensure that there is no possibility of identifying an individual student it is required that cell sizes below five be suppressed.
Page last updated on July 24, 2009.
