Manage Your Research Data: Qualitative Data
What is Qualitative Data?
Research data is any information collected, created, or examined to produce original research results. This includes qualitative data, which is material gathered for textual, conceptual, or qualitative studies. Examples of qualitative data may include:
- audio or text files from interviews, focus groups, surveys, oral histories
- image or video files of people, animals, or scenes
- direct observations, such as field notes
- written documents, such as books, news articles and webpages
Unlike quantitative data (codes, tabular data, observational data), Qualitative data is not reproducible.
Which Qualitative Data Should be Kept & Shared?
The value of your data comes from 1) its usefulness for other researchers to explore and 2) its archival or historical value for future generations. When deciding what to keep, ask yourself:
- Are there other copies?
- Could someone approximate your conclusions based on what you’ve written or recorded?
- What ethical or legal guidelines has your funding agency, IRB, or discipline provided?
But what about confidentiality?
It’s a big deal. Science is moving towards full sharing of data, but there are exceptions for:
- Sensitive data: names, dates, locations, and sensitive topics can all be obscured or removed.
- Ethics: what did you promise in an IRB application, or directly to your participants?
- Disclosure risk: the risk of a break-in goes up the more you store or share files digitally.
Qualitative Data Management Tutorial
- Managing Qualitative Social Science Data An interactive online courseThis interactive on-line course includes four modules, each with multiple lessons. Together they constitute a complete course on managing qualitative data; each lesson is also designed to function as a stand-alone resource that can be completed individually.
More Discussion on Qualitative Data
- Ethnographic Field Data 2: When Not-Sharing is CaringCelia Emmelhainz, writing for Savage Minds, discusses the ethical dilemmas of sharing qualitative data, and increasing security for ethnographic data.
- Protecting Respondent Confidentiality in Qualitative ResearchAbstract: For qualitative researchers, maintaining respondent confidentiality while presenting rich, detailed accounts of social life presents unique challenges. These challenges are not adequately addressed in the literature on research ethics and research methods. Using an example from a study of breast cancer survivors, I argue that by carefully considering the audience for one’s research and by re-envisioning the informed consent process, qualitative researchers can avoid confidentiality dilemmas that might otherwise lead them not to report rich, detailed data.
Credits
Content for this page has been adapted from Managing and Sharing Qualitative Research Data 101, with permission from Celia Emmelhainz, Anthropology and Qualitative Research Librarian, UC Berkeley.