Recent developments in archiving social research

Abstract

Recent developments in archiving have built on a 50 year foundation of sharing social survey data and are enabling the take-up of data curation practices on a wider scale. Advances in data archiving have been driven by the quest for comparable and harmonised data sources and mandates from sponsors of research to make data accessible – to provide both transparency and to maximise re-use value. In this paper, I discuss four recent developments that are bringing challenges for social science data archives: methods for archiving qualitative data; providing safe access to disclosive data; institutional data archiving initiatives; and dealing with the emergence of ‘new’ data types.

Keywords:

• data archiving
• social science data
• secondary analysis
• data re-use
• infrastructure
• qualitative data

Notes

1. See an early scholarly article on the idea of a survey archive (Lucci, Rokkan, & Meyetoff 1957).

2. An example of a catalogue record for a national survey can be viewed from the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) catalogue (ESDS, 2011). Data processing methods are well-documented by the larger national data archives (ICPSR, 2009; UK Data Archive, 2010).

3. See the European Framework and Audit and Certification for Digital Repositories, http://www.trusteddigitalrepository.eu/Site/Trusted%20Digital%20Repository.html

4. Examples of practical and regularly updated guidance include the UK Data Archive’s detailed content on Managing and Sharing Data (UK Data Archive, 2011b) and the Finnish Social Science Data Archive‘s advice on Informing Research Participants (FSD, 2008).

5. One of the first artiche to challenge the UK’s Qualidata archiving model was contributed by Mauthner, Parry, and Backett-Milburn (1998). Since then replies and further debate have ensued. See Irwin and Winterton (2011) for an overview.

6. The scheme produced an edited volume of seven interesting contributions on defining and capturing context for qualitative data (Corti, 2006).

7. Much cited and re-used guidance on, and training resources for, managing and sharing research data have been published by the UK Data Archive (Corti, Van den Eynden, Bishop, & Morgan-Brett, 2011; Van den Eynden, Corti, Woollard, & Bishop, 2011).