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‼️Deadline approaching 9 May‼️ for a Researcher position in Reproductive #Demography in Dr Josh Wilde's ERC SEXRATIO project at @oxforddemsci.bsky.social!

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Working on Environment & Population and want to connect at an insightful and fun conference with the British Society for Population Studies? Submit your abstract (250 words) to our climate change strand by 9 May! ☄️ #BSPS2025 w/ Dermot Grenham & Tobi Rüttenauer

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What are your thoughts? Ways forward? Let's discuss. My hope is that the vacuum will eventually be filled in an open & ethical way drawing on existing collaboration with national statistical offices. 🧵

Both extremes feel like a disaster🌪️ No DHS may be a disaster for progress for a better world. Sharing DHS in completely unregulated ways may be a disaster for scientific integrity & compromise our responsibility towards those from LMICs who've produced and own the data.

In this sense, the means may not justify the end. I would indeed like to share the DHS I have with you & I would like a state where you can share with me (on reasonable grounds). But as of now, under current circumstances, I'm not yet convinced that it's ethical to do so.

♻️ In practice, many scientists probably "recycle" their downloaded data for multiple (un)related projects ♻️ but this may simply reflect a culture where we see requesting access to data from vulnerable populations as an administrative formality, rather than an ethical necessity.

And another caveat: DHS access approvals never gave us lifelong rights to use DHS data for any research project. They were always project-dependent.

Should papers be rejected or retracted when data was used without consent or formal access approval? Who will enforce this? Research institutions and journals may need some guidance here.

Next, who will enforce that DHS are used in ethical ways? 🫡 Sharing data through unregulated pathways may put journal editors in a difficult position whose task is to ensure rigor of science.

Let's put it this way: If a national statistics office (or respondent!) wanted to withdraw consent for use of the data, who would they even turn to? 🫠 After the data has been publicly available and been shared in informal science networks?Seems like a Wild West of DHS traces.🤠

can we simply assume all respondents and national offices would consent to their data being shared in any different way, through different institutions than originally laid out?

Sure, DHS respondents might have a significant interest in the data being used for research after they spent hours and hours strenuously interviewing, too. 🙏 But

I'm inclined to argue we need to center data sharing decisions on respondents' and national offices' rights, even if we as scholars or staff suspect "we know what's good for their populations".

Understandably, former employees of the DHS/USAID who spent their careers making data available that was meant to benefit population health, wellbeing, and scientific advances find it heartbreaking that the data won't be used. ❤️‍🩹 While I deeply empathize with that,

Paradoxically, while we'd share the data to avoid being gatekeepers, this form of gatekeeping is likely to disadvantage junior scholars and scientists from minority backgrounds and LMICs further, with no objective/consistent evaluation of the validity of research proposals 😒

In the case of scientists sharing data with other scientists through informal pathways: We'd have a new network-based gatekeeping mechanism, functioning through trust and reputation. ↔️

Probably not because we never had respondents' and national statistical offices' who legally own the data consent for such changes?