Privacy and Confidentiality

 

Subjects who decide to enter the site once and only once, only provide information about their date of birth and their IP address. Subjects who choose to enter a second time to take a different test provide an email address as well. Subject identity is protected in three ways. First, each subject’s IP address-date of birth information/email are stored in a part of the data base that is separate from their answers; date of birth is used to provide age and can be extracted separately. Second, all experimental data are coded in such a way that it would be difficult for an unauthorized user to interpret the results. Third, the database is secured behind a firewall to prevent unauthorized access to the data itself. Before analyzing any data from the MST, information about subject identity is removed.

We plan to keep our files for several years and ultimately, to make the data bases available to other researchers, but without the IP and email addresses. All public discussion of the data will be in terms of statistical patterns as opposed to focused discussion on individual patterns of responses.

If you previously submitted your e-mail address and would like to remove it, please click here.