New Repository Offers a Home for Data That Aren’t Numbers – Wired Campus - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"After spending months or years collecting data from focus groups, surveys, and other sources, what are scholars doing with the mountains of information that may or may not have made it into their published research? In the quantitative-research world, where data come as numbers that can be collected and stored in an organized way, the answer has been to share the data. But for qualitative and multi-method researchers, whose data might come in the form of lengthy interview transcripts, field notes, or even recordings, the most common practice is to discard those materials. That’s mainly because data collected using less-structured techniques can be difficult to organize and share. To deal with that problem, the Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs has created a Qualitative Data Repository that is intended to serve as a platform to store, share, and preserve this kind of digital data. Diana Kapiszewski, co-director of the repository and an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University, says quantitative researchers in the United States have a stronger tradition of sharing data than do their qualitative counterparts. She has experienced the challenges posed by qualitative research methods—which can produce large amounts of information, some of it subject to copyright or to human-subject restrictions—and she says that while most researchers are interested in finding ways to share their data, doing so hasn’t always been possible. Thanks to technology, though, even qualitative data can now be digitally stored, easily shared, and quickly browsed. This is just what qualitative researchers need, says Colin Elman, the repository’s co-director, who is also an associate professor of political science at Syracuse ..."