Record Linkage
Definition
The process of matching records belonging to the same individual across two or more separate datasets, using shared identifiers or probabilistic matching.
Related terms
- Administrative Data
- Records generated by an agency, such as police, courts or prisons, as a by-product of its operational work, later reused for research...
- Cohort Study
- A longitudinal design that follows the same defined group of people, typically sharing a birth year or an event, over an extended...
- Dark Figure of Crime
- The gap between the actual volume of crime and the amount recorded in official statistics. Crimes go unrecorded when victims do not...
- Open Data
- Government or institutional data released in a structured, machine-readable format for public download and reuse, usually through a dedicated portal.
- Secondary Data
- Data collected by someone else for a different purpose and reanalysed by a researcher asking a new question of it.