Short Course: Managing Qualitative Data and Qualitative Research Transparency (QMMR2)

Managing Qualitative Data and Qualitative Research Transparency (QMMR2)

Colin Elman
9:00am – 1:00pm

INSTRUCTORS: Diana Kapiszewski, Georgetown University (dk784@georgetown.edu), and Sebastian Karcher, Syracuse University (skarcher@maxwell.syr.edu)

This short course has three central goals. First, the course provides guidance to help scholars manage data through the research lifecycle. We show how participants can meet funders’ data-management requirements and improve their own research by creating a data management plan. We discuss strategies for effectively documenting data throughout the research process to enhance their value to those who generated them and to other scholars. We also provide practical advice on keeping data secure to protect against data loss as well as illicit access to sensitive data. Second, we consider the multiple benefits of sharing data, the various uses of shared data (e.g. for evaluating scholarly products, for secondary analysis, and for pedagogical purposes), the challenges involved in sharing qualitative research data (including copyright and human participants-related concerns), and various ways to address those challenges. Finally, we discuss transparency in qualitative research. Achieving production transparency (i.e., describing how the data drawn on in published work were produced), and analytic transparency (i.e., describing how data were analyzed and how they support empirical claims and inferences in published work) facilitate the effective interpretation and evaluation of scholarly products. We introduce several ways of achieving both types of transparency in qualitative research. We focus in particular on “Annotation for Transparent Inquiry,” a new approach to transparency for work that uses narrative causal analysis supported by individual data sources.

 

**All Short Courses will take place on Wednesday, August 29 at the APSA 2018 Annual Meeting in Boston, MA.**