ABSTRACT
This chapter presents statistical, procedural, and empirical methods for resolving conflicts between regulation and research interests. A few readers may be unfamiliar with social experiments which have been undertaken and their bearing on privacy. To illustrate briefly, consider the Negative Income Tax Experiment which has run six years at a cost in excess of $13 million. The construction of multiple solutions to other ethical and legal problems in social research is also rigorous. The researcher makes up little clusters of individuals within each condition, and computes means or averages of characteristics of individuals within each cluster. In 1976, the US Congress considered changing the law governing confidentiality of Census Bureau records. Members of the national probability sample were interviewed by regular census staff about conventional census topics, such as income, housing, and marital status. The interviewee was informed that response was voluntary and was read a statement about the pertinent confidentiality
