5.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Research on the income situation of today’s and future retirees requires often record based
data. Because of their accuracy in the life-course data they can also, if they are linked to
survey data, make interviews shorter and less demanding for the interviewed persons.
However, the projects leading to this improved data are time-consuming, because the privacy
law demands extensive data protection requirements. Social security law requires furthermore
that the data are collected for research projects on social security related topics like health
status and early retirement. Record-to-record linkage does not require informed consent to
protect privacy, but extensive technical provisions that separate the date at an early stage from
the identifier. Both ways of matching provide much improved data quality at reasonable price,
but require an established infrastructure able to handle the procedure required from privacy
laws and regulations.
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