CBS Microdata Services

Infrastructure  and user services  

CBS Microdata Services is the facility through which accredited external research organisations can get access to microdata available within CBS for their own research purposes. CBS offers over 7000 yearly datasets, covering about 300 topics over periods ranging from 5 to 30 years. The data are based either on surveys performed by CBS and, mainly, on administrative registers originating from government and other (semi-)public institutions. The data are related to the entire field of national statistics and more: demography, education, health, labour and social security, income and property, business economics (production, finance, international trade and globalization, innovation etc), criminality, regional data, construction and building, etcetera. Standardized documentation reports for all datasets are available on the Internet.  

The data can be accessed from the institute of the researcher through a secured remote access facility. Strict protection of privacy and confidentiality is guaranteed by pseudonimization of the data and by a number of administrative procedures and technical measures; here CBS-law and GDPR (AVG) are leading. Researchers do their statistical analyses while the data remain within a secure network environment inside CBS, using a range of software tools standard available. They are allowed to export only aggregate results from which no information about individual persons or organizations can be retrieved.  

All data collection is funded entirely with public means; the operational costs of the service however have to be fully covered by its users. Information like the catalogue of available datasets, overviews of projects running and of resulting (scientific) publications etc are published on the institute’s website www.cbs.nl/microdata. 

Examples/description of the type of research  

The facility may be used for statistical/scientific research purposes only, and results need to be made publicly accessible. Currently, CBS Microdata Services is used by all Dutch universities and several abroad, and by government based, not-for-profit or private research institutions. Starting 200 new research project yearly, about 1500 researchers are actively taking benefit of the facility. 

The major added value is that all datasets can be linked at micro level through meaningless linkage keys for persons, households, enterprises, etc, including the employer-employee linkage. A number of external research institutes has also decided to make their own data available within the secure environment in linkable format  Under appropriate conditions researchers can also bring in their own datasets to link them to CBS microdata after encryption of the relevant identifiers. 

CBS is partner in the national infrastructure for the social sciences ODISSEI (Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations) which is included in the NWO Roadmap for Large Scale Scientific Infrastructures, and in that context collaborates with other ODISSEI-related infrastructures included in this landscape to identify synergies, efficiencies and new lines of innovation. ODISSEI supports CBS microdata research projects in a variety of ways such as the development of new methodological tools and computational facilities, including access to the National Super Computer at SURF. 

How to access the infrastructure  

First, a secure VPN connection to CBS is set up. All other internet traffic is thereby made impossible. With a username and password, a token and an sms code you can then log in to the CBS microdata environment. Within the environment you only have rights to access your own project environment and read-only rights (in the central repository within the CBS microdata environment) on the datasets you requested for and got the permission to use.