Defending Dignity A Manual for National Human Rights Institutions on Monitoring Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Information gathered should be relevant to the interests of the community – as a whole, and as individual members of the community, without discrimination – in accordance with the objectives of the monitoring activity. To adopt a rights-based approach to collecting primary data, consider the following “questions to ask frequently” (QAFs), developed by the Responsible Data Forum, when working with marginalized communities. QAFs about the community QAFs about empowerment and capacity building QAFs about privacy, security, threats and safety • Who is the community? What are the boundaries that surround it in terms of ethnicity, gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, language, religion, etc? • Who is making the decisions about the data and what are the implications? • Do you have full understanding of what is sensitive data in the context of this community? • Are your activities disempowering the community? • Can you detail the risks and the threats? • What makes this community marginalized? • Who should analyse the data? • Do you understand your own prejudice about the community? • Do you fully understand the context and nuances of this community? • Do you have ongoing informed consent with the community on your activities? • What does the data tell them? • Do they understand the implications of sharing the findings? • Does the community have capacity to store and protect the data adequately? • Is anonymizing names enough to protect the community? • Is there a possibility the data can be misused (e.g. a property developer using data about a slum)? • Does the community have appropriate access to the data if they aren’t storing it themselves? 7.7. IN PRACTICE: COLLECTING PRIMARY DATA If you decide to undertake some form of primary data collection, your research plan will be a crucial guide for this work. Accordingly, it is important to have a comprehensive strategy that explains: • How you will identify the sites or populations where you intend to collect the data. For example, are they random samples? If not, what criteria will you use to select them? • Who will collect the data. Will it be staff from your NHRI? Partner NGOs? Community representatives? • The role of the community. How will you ensure that your data collection is participatory, empowering and follows a human rights-based approach? • The data collection tools that will be used. Have these been standardized? Have data collectors received adequate instructions on how to use them? • The time period over which you will collect data. Is it a week? Month? Three months? Be generous when estimating the time involved. • Protocols for ensuring the security of data collected. This is particularly important if you are collecting data that identifies individuals. 80