Record Linkage
Definition
Matching records belonging to the same individual across separate datasets, using a shared identifier or probabilistic matching on fields like name and date of birth.
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...
- 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.
- 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...
- Data Quality
- How complete, accurate and consistently classified a dataset is, which shapes what conclusions it can support.
- Digital Trace Data
- Records generated automatically as a by-product of online or networked activity, such as social media posts or platform server logs.
- Longitudinal Design
- A study that collects data on the same units at more than one point in time, as opposed to a single-wave cross-sectional...
Explained in these topics
- Sources of Crime and Criminal Justice DataThe process of matching records belonging to the same individual across two or more separate datasets, using shared identifiers or probabilistic matching.
- Sources of Crime Data (UGC-NET Unit VI)