Aims & Objectives

Aim:

• To address the epistemological, ethical, methodological and practical challenges raised by archiving, representing and sharing data from a unique, QL dataset. This will entail developing an effective strategy for disseminating the resulting exemplar of good practice and exploring practical applications for the resulting ethically sound, high quality, innovatively represented, resource. In doing so the project will establish the viability of the ESRC's planned investment in the development of QL methodology.

Objectives:

• Develop innovative, participatory methods for re-negotiating informed consent for the archiving, sharing and representation of a partial data set; including the development of ethical and practical criteria for selection and for anonymising all data for each case
• Explore and develop participatory, ethically sound, innovative methods (visual/audio/textual) for contextualizing these case data; and strategies for representing the QL resource in innovative ways, involving Qualidata, other archivists and practitioners in the archiving, sharing and representation of qualitative data in a collaborative process
• Establish the potential for secondary analysis of the resource by networking and a scoping exercise to establish potential academic and non-academic users and exploring different forms of doing this
• Disseminate the findings of each aspect of the project (innovative data archiving, representing and sharing) effectively. This will include producing a short report and scholarly articles detailing a unique account of the processes involved in making such data available for archiving, representation and sharing (the former being circulated to archivists and the social science research community, in particular the National Centre for Research Methods, the Research Methods programme and the National e-Social Science Centre as a basis for relevant training initiatives). A by-task breakdown of QL archiving costs will also be included
• Identify effective methods and channels for disseminating the resulting exemplar to academic and non-academic users; including the identification of further funding opportunities for producing practical applications