Using archived qualitative data for teaching: practical and ethical considerations

Abstract

This paper will examine the practicalities and the ethics of using archived qualitative data for teaching. Practicalities focus on the basic infrastructure and resources: where data can be obtained, what supporting contextual materials exist, and the provision of customised teaching resources ready for classroom use. The remainder of the paper addresses the ethics of reusing data, first with an overview and then with a closer look at ethical challenges in reusing data for teaching. A symmetry in the roles of researchers and teachers frames this discussion. Researchers collect data from participants for deposit to an archive; teachers access data from an archive on behalf of their students. Both researchers and teachers are acting on behalf of others in their relationships with the archive, and this mediation has ethical consequences. The reuse debate has largely focused on risks to participants, notably possible violations of their privacy, but reusing data for teaching foregrounds new issues: the potential benefit for data to enhance learning, equitable access to data and autonomy of both research participants and students, thus enriching the ethical debate about archiving data.

Keywords:

• data archive
• ethics
• qualitative data
• reuse
• secondary analysis
• teaching

Notes

1. The UK Data Archive, the Irish Qualitative Data Archive, The Finnish Social Science Data Archive, WISDOM in Austria, the Australian National Data Service and others all handle qualitative data.

2. Student may have direct access also, but then they are not in an explicit teaching relationship.