Ethical Data Reuse in Multidisciplinary Health and Social Research

Claire Thompson

Ethical Data Reuse in Multidisciplinary Health and Social Research

Author(s)	Dr. Claire Thompson
Country	United States
Abstract	The growing availability of electronic health records, administrative databases, longitudinal surveys, social-care records, genomic repositories, digital-behavior traces, and population datasets has created substantial opportunities for multidisciplinary health and social research. Data reuse can reduce duplication in primary data collection, enable longitudinal and cross-sector analysis, improve statistical power, support research on comparatively rare conditions, and facilitate investigation of the social determinants of health. These scientific benefits are accompanied by ethical challenges because data collected for clinical care, public administration, social services, previous research, or another legitimate purpose may subsequently be used in contexts that individuals did not specifically anticipate. Contemporary research-ethics frameworks therefore require more than simple de-identification or institutional possession of a dataset. Ethical reuse must consider consent and reasonable expectations, scientific and public value, proportionality, privacy, re-identification risk, data minimization, group harms, equitable benefit, secure access, accountability, and community interests. Current international developments reinforce this governance-oriented direction. The World Health Organization supports secondary research reuse under technical, ethical, and legal safeguards; NIH policy combines data-sharing expectations with privacy and controlled-access mechanisms; and the European Health Data Space establishes a developing framework for regulated secondary use through permits and secure processing environments. The present study develops an Ethical Multidisciplinary Data Reuse Framework (EMDRF) and evaluates four hypothetical governance models through an explicitly simulation-based methodology. A synthetic corpus of 400 proposed data-reuse scenarios was modeled across six domains: purpose legitimacy, consent compatibility, privacy protection, secure access, social and community fairness, and accountability. The simulated Ethical Data-Reuse Readiness Score increases from 38 for minimally governed open reuse to 91 for interdisciplinary ethical reuse. The findings demonstrate that ethical data reuse should not be framed as a binary choice between unrestricted openness and complete data closure. Rather, responsible reuse requires proportional combinations of technical, organizational, ethical, legal, and participatory safeguards matched to the sensitivity of the data and the consequences of the proposed research.
Keywords	data reuse, secondary data research, health data, social research, research ethics, privacy, informed consent, data governance, multidisciplinary research
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 2, Issue 6, November-December 2021
Published On	2021-12-14

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American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Ethical Data Reuse in Multidisciplinary Health and Social Research

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