FAQs About the Charlotte Regional Data Trust

The Charlotte Regional Data Trust (Data Trust) is a community-university partnership that links data across service and organizational silos to provide information our community can act on. The Data Trust is a nonprofit organization governed by community and university board members committed to increasing the community’s capacity for data-informed decision-making and fostering research that impacts the community and deepens understanding of complex community issues.

Read our State of Our Data Report for more information.

Yes. Through its affiliation with UNC Charlotte and the Charlotte Urban Institute, the Data Trust offers analytical support to assist organizations in their research and data analyses efforts. Organizations can contract separately with the Data Trust and the Charlotte Urban Institute to conduct research and/or program evaluations using integrated data.  The Data Trust also connects community organizations to faculty researchers whose subject matter expertise may be valuable to the organization. If you are interested in doing research with the data housed in the Data Trust, email DataTrust@charlotte.edu

This page has more information about how to request data. To view available data, visit this link. You can also schedule office hours to discuss your project in more detail. 

Those who wish to use data must complete a data license request that details the project, requested data fields, the research methodology and analyses that will be used, and the dissemination plan. The request is reviewed by the Data and Research Oversight Committee (DAROC) and if approved, the researcher will enter into a Data Use License to use the data.  De-identified data will then be securely transferred to the researcher. To begin this process, email Sydney Idzikowski at sidzikow@charlotte.edu

The data shared with the Data Trust is individual-level, identifiable data so that information can be linked across different sources. Because of the sensitive nature of personally identifiable information (PII), the Data Trust has numerous policies and procedures in place to protect the data including legal, technical, procedural, and physical protections. The legal data sharing agreement the Data Trust enters into with each data partner explicitly states the expectations of confidentiality and security. The current Data Trust data security approved by the Board of Directors can be obtained by emailing us.

PII is NEVER released to researchers. Researchers who would like to use data must first submit a Data License Request to the Data and Research Oversight Committee (DAROC). DAROC oversees the use of data for the Board of Directors and includes University researchers and members of the community, including a representative from each data depositor. The agency that owns the data being requested must approve the use of their data during the approval process. 

If a request is approved, the researcher will sign a Data Use License outlining how the data can and cannot be used. After the Data Use Licence  is complete and requested data are integrated, Data Trust and DAROC members will review the dataset prior to release to ensure it does not inadvertently identify any individual. Data Trust staff and DAROC monitor use and final release of research products to ensure compliance with the terms of the Data Use Agreement and ensure that no individual is reidentified and that the researcher is in compliance.

More information can be found here.

Administrative data is typically not collected for research purposes. It is useful data for researchers, however, because it often tells us who uses services, how often those services are used, and the outcomes of those services. Linking these data tell a more comprehensive and complex story If a researcher wanted to understand the impact of absenteeism on student test scores, the researcher could survey or interview individual students for this information. However, this information already exists as administrative data. Researchers can use the administrative data instead to reduce the research burden on both the research team and the people in the data. In addition, with administrative data, researchers can often access a larger sample or study a whole population instead of a sample (e.g., children experiencing literal homelessness in Charlotte-Mecklenburg). A larger sample allows researchers to use more analytic tools and can result in more statistically powerful results. 

Browse our articles for examples of how administrative data has been used in research in the Charlotte region. 

For examples of how administrative data is used across the country, visit this page.

The Data Trust is always in the process of negotiating data sharing agreements with local government and non-profit agencies. Visit this page for details about data partners and available data.

In addition to the community benefits available to a data partner, additional partner benefits include:

• Access to a data partner portal with information to better understand your organizational data in the context of other organizations and institutions.
• Use a mature and vetted data governance structure instead of recreating processes to share, link, and license use of data.
• Gain feedback on your organization’s data quality via the data partner portal
• Access the data steward program that provides a graduate student steward to assess, inventory, and make recommendations on an organization’s current data culture and infrastructure.
• Access Charlotte Urban Institute research staff and UNC Charlotte faculty researchers to assist in understanding your organizational data.

The Data Trust creates the opportunity to integrate fragmented community data for community benefit. Benefits include:

• A deeper and more nuanced understanding of pressing issues that span organizations and institutions.
• The capacity to better develop solutions and understand the impact of an intervention on people and across organizations and institutions. For example, Habitat for Humanity of Charlotte used integrated data describing the longitudinal impact of homeownership on families’ use of community services and children’s educational outcomes. The Housing Instability and Homelessness Report Series uses integrated data describing a group of children in emergency shelter who were not accessing available services at school. Salvation Army and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools responded with new support and training to ensure children are connected to services.
• The ability to identify areas where organizations can work better together.
• Enhanced capacity for longitudinal research (some data date back to early 2000s)

The Data Trust became part of the Charlotte Urban Institute in 2012. Founded in 1969, the Charlotte Urban Institute is our region’s applied research and community outreach center. We seek solutions to the complex social, economic and environmental challenges facing our communities. We engage expertise across a diverse set of disciplines and life experiences to curate data, and we conduct actionable research and policy analysis that helps us make better decisions to benefit us all. The Data Trust is now a critical resource used in the Charlotte Urban Institute’s work. 

Administrative data is the information that organizations and agencies collect in the process of their daily work. This information includes demographic data such as race and age, program use information, and outcome information like student attendance or arrest records. Administrative data primarily collected for operational purposes. The Data Trust repurposes administrative data for research, evaluation, and planning

An integrated data system (IDS) holds administrative data from multiple organizations and can match information across these organizations at the individual level. For example, the information about students served by a school can be matched to data from the Department of Social Services (DSS) so that a school can better understand its students and DSS can decide where to offer services. Or, a nonprofit organization can match its program list to multiple agencies to learn how programs impacted clients and how to better serve them. An IDS can combine data to create a more complete description of how policies and programs impact the individuals they serve. The key elements of an IDS are governance, legal, technical, and staff capacity.