Preparing Qualitative Data for Archiving
On this page you can find information about issues involved in preparing data for archiving.
Anonymisation Protocol and Tools
Frequently asked questions about the ethical use of Qualitative Data
Digital Image Archiving Formats
Providing guides to your archived material
Depositor and end-user licenses and legal agreements
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Ethical Frameworks
The links below indicate best practise developed in by other organisations and discussion of the issues involved. Archiving qualitative data ensures that research work done has an impact beyond the immediate research project. However, it does raise questions on how the initial research is conducted. These include the issues of how to obtain informed consent and how qualitative data can be anonymised and prepared for distribution. There also needs to be consideration of access requirements and re-use of the data. The IQDA will develop suggested protocols and practices to assist researchers in their endeavour to create data resources which can archived and thus used by the wider research community.
Sample Consent Forms
Qualidata have provided a useful discussion of the ethical and legal issues to be considered when obtaining consent. It also proves examples of sample consent forms.
The Irish Qualitative Data Archive has prepared a sample consent form which can be found here.
Anonymization Tools and Protocols
The Irish Qualitative Data Archive has prepared an anonymisation protocol which can be found here.
The Irish Qualitative Data Archive has created an anonymisation tool which can be downloaded and used to speed up the process of changing names in the transcript. It works both on mac and on pc's. The tool can be found here. The tool is in beta, if you have any difficulty using it, we would greatly appreciate it if you could contact us.
We have produced a guide to using the tool. If you want to test the tool, to see it how it works, here is a sample text file and here is a sample Changes File which has the name's that are to be changed.
The Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) have created a transcript anonymization tool which speeds up the process of changing names in transcript. Their guide to preserving respondent privacy can be found here.
Frequently asked questions about ethical use of Qualitative Data
Q. Is it possible to archive qualitative data, given ethical considerations?
A. Yes. Qualitive Archives exist in many countries. There are major international holdings already of world-class repute - UK Qualidata, ICPSR in Michigan and the Henry A Murray Archive in Harvard. Other major social science archives in Europe – such as the Finnish and Swiss archives - are planning to include qualitative data in their holdings. All these archives have ethical frameworks that govern the depositing and use of archive data.
Q. What is the difference between archiving qualitative data and quantitive data?
A. Many of the issues entailed in archiving qualitative data are similar. In each case there is a risk that confidentiality might be breached, and archives have an obligation to ensure that it is protected through anonymisation, withdrawal of sensitive data etc. The role of the Irish Qualitative Data Archive is to establish procedures and protocols, in line with international best practice appropriate to qualitative data.
Q. How does the IQDA ensure that the archive meets it’s ethical commitments?
A.The IQDA has developed an Ethical Use Framework drawing on best practice developed at Qualidata - the UK National Qualitative Data Archive, Timescapes, a multidisciplinary longitudinal qualitative project based at the University of Leeds and the Henry Murray Archives based at Harvard University, Boston, USA.
There are four interconnecting components to this framework.
The first is informed consent to archive obtained at the time of the fieldwork. The IQDA has prepared pro-forma letters and forms that have been used in previous Irish and UK studies. The second is the use of a rigorous anonymisation protocol. Such a protocol has been developed by the IQDA based on the experience of Irish and UK research projects. The third component is a Rights Management Framework which includes depositor and end-user licenses and legal agreements, in which the user undertakes not to breach confidentiality by using identifiable information in published work or to try and contact research subjects and agrees to ethical use and re-use of the data. Finally the last component is a system of options for access and user restrictions; for example, access to very sensitive data may be closed for a period of time.
In addition, along with all social science researchers in Ireland, we subscribe to the ethical standards imposed by professional organizations such as the Sociological Association of Ireland. Part of our role involves alerting researchers to these standards, thus promoting high quality research procedures. Our work here is also informed by the RESPECT project, which was funded by the European Commission’s Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme, to draw up professional and ethical guidelines for the conduct of socio-economic research.
The Respect Project can be found here
The ethical guidelines of the Sociological Association of Ireland (SAI) can be found here.
The ethical guidelines of the British Sociological Association can be found here.
The code of ethics of the American Sociological Association can be found here.
National University of Ireland, Maynooth statements on Ethical Research.
Archiving Formats
If you are unsure of the suitability of your file formats please contact IQDA for advice.
Preferred:
* Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) (.flac)
* WAV file (.wav)
Accepted:
* MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3)
*Audio Interchange File Format (.aiff)
Note. Many commercial digital diction recorders produced by Olympus, Philips and Grundig record in DSS format, which is not ideal if the data is to be archived. When buying a recorder ensure it records in WAV format and at a minimum 44.1k sampling rate
Further information on audio technology can be found at;
Qualidata Audiovisual Standards
Bibliographical Center for Research best practive on audio
International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives
Text Formats
Preferred
* Rich Text Format (.rtf)
* Plain text data, ASCII (.txt)
* eXtensible Markup Language (XML) marked-up text according to an appropriate Document Type Definition (DTD) or schema
Accepted
* Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
* widely-used proprietary formats e.g. Microsoft Word (.doc/.docx)
* Proprietary/software-specific formats such as NUD*IST, NVivo and ATLAS.ti
Digital Image Formats
Preferred
TIFF (version 6) uncompressed
Accepted
* JPEG (.jpeg, .jpg)
* TIFF (other versions)
* Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF/A or PDF)
* raw image format (.RAW)
* software-specific formats (such as, for example, Photoshop .psd files) may be acceptable, but contributors should contact IQDA for advice.
Providing Guides to your archived material
When depositing your data with the Archive, it is very useful for future researchers if you include supplementary documents that provide contextual information about the data and the data gathering process. To assist future researchers who are trying to find data-sets, the supplementary document should provide a brief over-view of the key questions and themes that emerged from your research. This document will be searchable and so will be an important way researchers will find your dataset.
Information about the data-gathering process is also helpful in providing future researchers a context for interpreting the data: this could include many types of information, from where the interviews were conducted, to details about news stories that were prevalent at the time the research was conducted, which may have influenced the interviewees responses.
The contextual document should also contain a guide to any interviews, which would enable future researchers to select particular interviews that are relevant to their research.
The IQDA has produced a guide to how to produce contextual documents. It can be downloaded from here.
Depositor and end-user licenses and legal agreements
In order to deposit data to the IQDA, the depositor and the IQDA must sign a depositor license and legal agreement. We work with the depositer to address any concerns with confidentiality and access they may have, and can assist them in developing an archiving strategy appropriate to the data.
The depositor license and legal aggreement can be found here.
Additionally in order to use the data, end-users must complete a data access form and sign a legal agreement with the IQDA. This can be found here.
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