Personal Codes in Longitudinal Studies III. The Empirical Test of Fault-Tolerant Linkage of Unencrypted and Encrypted Self-Generated Codes

Abstract

In this article the quality of a fault-tolerant linkage of unencrypted and encrypted self-generated codes is compared. To obtain suitable data a field experiment with students was carried out. For the linkage of the encrypted codes the programs “Merge Toolbox”, “BloomEncoder” and “BloomComparator” developed by Schnell, Bachteler and Reiher (2009a) were used. The results show that the fault-tolerant linkage with encrypted codes works even better than using unencrypted codes under special conditions.