Standard: RR - The Ethics of Archiving and Reusing Qualitative Data: Guidelines for Practice

California State University San Marcos Corporation, San Marcos CA

Investigators

Abstract

This workshop that will advance scholarly research by developing guidelines for the archiving, sharing, and reuse of qualitative data. By focusing on the development of guidelines that are sensitive to the ethical and epistemological concerns entailed in making qualitative data public, the workshop will move beyond debates focused on the contrasts between qualitative and quantitative research. These guidelines will offer a practical resource for use by qualitative researchers (graduate students, senior scholars, policy analysts, and project and program staff), IRBs, and other institutional bodies charged with oversight regarding the ethical conduct of qualitative research. In addition, they will be of interest to researchers and stakeholders beyond the academy, including NGOs, not-for-profit agencies, and funding institutions. Making qualitative data publically available has become salient at a time when there are increasing calls for transparency in the conduct of social research. Responding to this call may be most readily accomplished by researchers whose large quantitative data sets can be anonymized and when consent appears to be either straightforward, or these data are already in the public domain. This workshop will focus on the ethical challenges of archiving qualitative inquiry and the transferability of quantitative data archiving, sharing, and reuse. A multidisciplinary group of workshop participants who are sensitive to ethical concerns of informed consent and preserving confidentiality, as well as on the epistemic assumptions that underlie interpretive research methods will develop draft guidelines for making qualitative data public. Once the guidelines are finalized they will be disseminated to members of academic and research communities, organizations, funders, and journal editors. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.