Ethical Clearance Reference Number: 200230106

You can download a copy of this participant privacy notice by clicking here.

Your Personal Data
The University of Glasgow, alongside Kings College London (KCL), will be what’s known as the ‘Joint Data Controllers’ of your personal data processed in relation to the social network portion of the U-Belong study. This privacy notice will explain how The University of Glasgow will process your personal data.

Why we need it
U-Belong aims to develop a better understanding of what helps students to feel socially connected at university. This part of the study will collect detailed information about social networks – that is, the people you consider to be part of your social circle. If you are a participant in the U-Belong Social Network survey, we will collect personal information about you, including the names (first name and initial of last name) and characteristics (e.g., age, gender) of your social ties, as well as how you feel about them (e.g., emotional closeness) during an interview with a trained fieldworker. This is to help us carry out our research. We will only collect data that we need in order to meet the aims of the research. The aims of our research project are explained in the Participant Information Sheet. You can ask us about anything you’re unsure of at any time.

Where do we get your personal data from and what we do with it?
We get your contact details (e.g., name, email) from KCL, as you took part in the longitudinal survey, and provided consent for the social network portion of U-Belong.

We will use your answers from the social network survey to understand social relationships. The data that you provide in the interview will be linked to your longitudinal survey data held at KCL via an anonymised participant ID.

We will only use name information to make sure that the information about social contacts is accurate. The names will be replaced with anonymous ID numbers when we analyse the data. We also remove the names of the original study participants to prevent anyone being able to identify personal information from the study data, apart from the research team who collect the data confidentially. The research team at KCL only keeps this data so they can speak to participants about taking part in future research. Glasgow will not retain your personal contact details or name.

Legal basis for processing your data
We have a legal basis for processing all personal data. For this study, the legal basis is public task. That is the legal basis for data processing is the public task of a University/Medical Research Council Unit to conduct research into student wellbeing.

What we do with it and who we share it with

• Your personal data is processed by staff at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom. Your research data will be securely exported to our collaborators on the project at Kings College London, where it will be processed. Glasgow University will retain a copy of this data.

• Pseudonymous data, that doesn’t contain any identifiable information about individuals who took part in the study, or their social contacts, may be made available in a secure repository, such as the UK Data archive, for future research and learning, and users will agree that they will not attempt to identify individuals from the data.

How long do we keep it for?
Your research data will be retained by the University of Glasgow for at least 10 years. It will be stored securely and kept confidential. Your name and contact information will be deleted by the University of Glasgow at the end of data collection (May 2024). KCL will retain a copy of your personal data.

What are your rights?*
You have the right to information about why we are processing data on social contacts, and this privacy notice is how we are giving you that information. We also have provided study participants with information about how we process their data.

We are conducting this project in line with article 89 of the General Data Protection Regulation, which means that we will not automatically provide you with the right to see data about you that was collected as part of the research study. You also will not be able to delete or modify the data.

If you contact the study team, we can provide you with some information from your survey. For example, you can ask a researcher for information collected during an interview. We won’t update any of the information after the interviews, this is so that the data for all participants was collected in the exact same way. Making sure all participant data is similar helps improve how we analyse the data.  

If you wish to discuss your data rights, please contact dp@gla.ac.uk.

Complaints
If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact the University Data Protection Officer who will investigate the matter.
Our Data Protection Officer can be contacted at dataprotectionofficer@glasgow.ac.uk
If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are not processing your personal data in accordance with the law, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) https://ico.org.uk/