Privacy Policy
About.
We are accessing your social media group as part of a study run by researchers at the University of Cambridge (UCAM) and The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
What is the purpose of this study?
The pandemic has had a big impact on social care and community organisation workers who are key players in supporting vulnerable populations in the UK. Those working directly with the public have shown marked decreases in wellbeing and increases in burnout.
While the wider study also looks at economic impacts with the aim of increasing support for social care and community organisation workers, this Privacy Policy relates to the component that tracks real‑time trends in resilience, resistance and burnout. Resilience is about ‘bouncing back’ during adversity and resistance about ‘pushing back’ to ensure safety. While typically seen as separate, recent research shows that frontline workers can be resilient and resistant at the same time, with resistance helping to protect against burnout.
Our aim is to increase support for frontline social care workers by creating a visual ‘dashboard’ showing real time and predictive trends for worker resilience, resistance and burnout across Greater London and East of England. These trends will be presented as a simple graph.
Our methodology involves analysing data from social media groups used by social care and community organisation workers in Greater London or East of England. We will only access the data if we have the appropriate permissions from your group admin and as otherwise required by the social media platform (e.g., WhatsApp).
We will not be collecting any personal information (no names, images, placenames, IP addresses, or identifying information) from any social media posts. We are using a validated methodology that has been used for many years and is a well-established methodology that prevents researchers from seeing any postings and therefore any personal data/ identifying information (e.g., names, mobile numbers, placenames, organisational names, dates, IP addresses, etc.) or any part of the posts (e.g., words, sentences, emojis, gifs, other images, photographs, html addresses, etc.).
If you have any questions, you can always contact the study group.
How will the social media group’s data be processed?
Automatic collection of posts
Every day, a secure system will be used collect new posts from the social media groups that have given permission.
Researchers do not see these posts. The system collects them and immediately begins processing them.
Removal of all identifying details
As soon as the posts are collected, the system removes anything that could identify a person, group, or workplace, such as names, places, organisations, photos, mobile phone numbers, links to websites or other social media, emojis, and any other details.
It then turns the remaining text into anonymous data (numbers). Researchers do not see the original posts or the text that is turned into data.
Creation of anonymous trend graphs
All anonymous data is combined from all participating groups in your wider region (Greater London or East of England). The system uses this combined information to work out overall patterns of resilience, resistance and burnout.
Researchers only ever see the final trend lines on a graph, not any posts, not any individual‑level or any group-level information.
The University of Cambridge is the sponsor and data controller for this study. The lawful basis for carrying out this study under GDPR is Task (i.e., academic research) in the Public Interest, (Article 6,1e) as research is cited as part of the University’s duties. Although we are not storing any personal data from social media groups, we are required to provide this link to information on how the University uses personal data when it is stored:
To be clear: we are not storing any personal data from social media groups.
Thank you for reading this policy.