DSC-2025-24 | Safe, FAIR, Legal: Working with Personal Data in Research
Wann?
25. November 2025
09:30 - 16:00 Uhr
Wo?
Campus (Raum folgt in Kürze)
Trainer*innen
Dr. Susanne de Vogel & Nele Fuchs
Data Science Center, Universit?t Bremen
Anzahl Teilnehmende: Max. 20
Sprache: Englisch
Why is the topic important?
Personal and sensitive data are not only relevant in social and health sciences and the humanities – they can arise in almost any discipline and can take quantitative or qualitative forms. In engineering, researchers might work with sensor data from individuals using wearable devices or smart environments. In linguistics, speech recordings or language corpora can contain identifiable information. In the natural sciences, human-related metadata in biological or environmental studies can inadvertently reveal personal details. Whether you're conducting interviews, analysing survey responses, collecting behavioural data, or working with administrative records: if your research involves people directly or generates data about them, you are likely working with personal or sensitive information. In such cases, your data require special care.
When working with personal data, researchers must meet additional legal, ethical, and technical requirements, particularly as data sharing and reuse become increasingly important. Failing to meet these standards can lead to legal consequences, reputational damage, and a loss of trust from participants and society in scientific research. A solid understanding of ethically and legally compliant data handling is therefore essential for all researchers who work with personal or sensitive research data.
Workshop Goal
By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to understand key legal and ethical principles for working with personal data, apply basic strategies for secure and compliant data handling, and make informed decisions about documentation, storage, and sharing in their own research.
Workshop Content
The workshop offers basic input, best practices, and hands-on exercises, and provides participants with helpful resources and materials to support their future work with personal data.
- Introduction to Open Science and FAIR principles
- Introduction to personal and sensitive data
- Basics of data protection (GDPR) and ethical standards
- Legal requirements, including informed consent, risk impact assessments, and data protection plan
- Data security, including data storage and backup, access management, passwords and encryption
- Anonymisation, pseudonymisation and deletion
- Using third-party tools and software
- Data archiving and sharing
Disclaimer: This workshop provides general guidance and good practices for handling personal and sensitive data in research. It does not constitute legal advice. For legally binding assessments or specific questions, please consult your institution’s data protection officer or legal department.
Target Audience & Prior Knowledge
This workshop is a beginners training for researchers from all disciplines and career stages. It’s aimed at researchers, who are working with – or planning to work with – quantitative or qualitative personal/sensitive data and want to learn how to handle such data in an ethically and legally compliant way.
Technical Requirements
Your own laptop and a stable Wifi connection (e.g. via eduroam).
About the Trainer
Dr. Susanne de Vogel and Nele Fuchs are data scientists for training and consulting at the DSC.
Dr. Susanne de Vogel is a data scientist for training and consulting at the DSC. She holds a diploma in Social Sciences from the University of Cologne (2013) and a PhD in Sociology from the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (2019). Susanne has worked for over 10 years on the development and implementation of various panel studies at the German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) in Hanover. Her competencies lie in survey design, instrument development and in the collection, preparation, analysis, and management of (survey) data.
Nele Fuchs has a background in Philosophy, Material Culture: Textile (CvO University of Oldenburg), and Transcultural Studies (University of Bremen). As a data scientist in the humanities, she supports researchers in the areas of digital humanities, data science methods and AI-systems for qualitative research, and FAIR-compliant qualitative data management. She has a comprehensive expertise in the ethical and moral considerations of computational methodologies within research contexts.