Today we're celebrating the first day of spring! But it's not the only reason to celebrate. Perhaps you didn't know that the 21st of March is also the International Day of Forests was established on the 21st day of March, by resolution of The United Nations General Assembly.

Each year, more than 13 million hectares (32 million acres) of forests are lost; an area roughly the size of England. As go the forests, so go the plant and animal species that they embrace – 80% of all terrestrial biodiversity. Most importantly, forests play a critical role in climate change including global warming: deforestation results in 12-18 percent of the world's carbon emissions – almost equal to all the CO2 from the global transport sector. 

Together with EcoMatcher we've prepared something special to help the marketing research industry greening the world, tree by tree, survey by survey. 

In the previous two articles posted in the GDPR category on Nebu's blog, we've covered the high-level overview of what the GDPR requirements and principles are. Now, let's dive into more specific, product-driven details.

More and more, clients ask us about Nebu Dub InterViewer's functionalities supporting them in complying with the upcoming GDPR legislation. One of the frequently reoccurring inquiries concerns removing respondent data from the project. 

When the respondent completed the interview, and a project is not a longitudinal study, often there is no use anymore for the client to keep the respondent data. In the light of GDPR removing or anonymizing that data even becomes a necessity.

In such case, it makes sense that the respondent data is 'disconnected' from the answers by removing the personally identifiable information from the sample data. Let's see how Nebu Dub InterViewer handles that for you.

Indeed, the functionality we're introducing in this blog post is one of key elements of complying with the GDPR as it fulfils four of six GDPR principles. Having an ability to set up an automated flow on how sample data will be processed in a project upfront will help fieldwork and marketing researchers adhere to:

In the previous blog post, we've introduced 100WEEKS, an inspiring Dutch non-profit organization helping women in Africa to get out of extreme poverty. Since 2015 they have already helped 240 women and are successfully proceeding with next projects. We (Nebu) are supporting this amazing social responsible initiative by providing 100WEEKS with Nebu Dub InterViewer to facilitate the data collection processes. It is great to see how they have been able to use Nebu's tool to the reality of the challenging African environment!

100WEEKS together with the local fieldwork team have set-up a tablet-based Pop-Up call center and are proceeding with the first interviews! The local program manager Fabrice (on the right) together with four interviewers (from left to right: Maureen, Lucie, Benign, Maliza) are calling women regularly to hear how they are doing and to collect data thereon. 

Data collection is an important part of the project as Johannes (in the middle of the picture in the front of Jeroen, 100WEEKS' co-founder) needs to measure the impact of the program on the lives of 100 women taking part in the project.

In the previous post, we explained what the main new roles introduced by GDPR are and what the impact of the new legislation is. Now, let's dive into more details.

Who is concerned?

Everyone!

If you process EU citizens data as part of your activity, regardless whether that processing occurs in or out of the EU, then the GDPR applies to you. Bear in mind that employee data and customer data ARE personal data. And the simple fact of storing that data is considered a processing activity.

Six principles of the GDPR 

The GDPR is not simply a ticking boxes process to avoid a big fine. It is principles driven and aim to change the way we perceive and treat personal data. There are six principles, listed below:

R has gained massive popularity in the past decade as the tool of choice for a wide variety of data analysts. The language is used as part of the data analysis toolchain in some of the biggest companies in the world. The former Revolution Analytics listed up some of the companies that work with R. That list looked impressive already in 2014 including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Monsanto, the FDA, Lloyds, Credit Suisse. Airbnb joined the club in 2016.  

R first appeared in the 1990s in New Zealand, as an implementation of the S statistical programming language. R was written by statisticians, with statistics and data in mind. It is a perfect choice for data analysis, statistical modeling, simulation and graphics. Even though these are key distinguishing features of R, the language provides some other powerful features we will mention below.

Statistics and data in the DNA

R allows you to manipulate (e.g., subset, recode, merge) data quickly.  Some R packages have been designed specifically for these purposes, e.g., dplyr. Typically, a majority of the time spent on an analysis project is spent on the analysis—preparing the data.  R is much adept and efficient in data preparation. Collected data often requires many steps in data processing to be ready for analysis, so R is ideal.