Why share your
research data?
Janet Boddy
School of Education and Social Work
Centre for Innovation and Research in
Childhood and Youth (CIRCY)
Ethics and data sharing
 Data sharing as an ethical act (or imperative?)
• Better use of public money
• Better use of participants’ time, reducing burden
• Enhancing research quality through:
• Transparency and openness
• Learning from past experience
• For future researchers
• As a resource for training
Or risky and problematic?
My perspective
An ethics ‘expert’
Research
• Studies to inform development of UK government
research governance systems
Advisory roles, such as
• ESRC Research Ethics Framework
• UK Academy of Social Sciences
• Childwatch International
• Association of Directors of Children’s Services
Ethics reviewer
• Sussex CREC (social sciences), Institute of
Education, Open University, NSPCC, European
Research Council
My perspective
As researcher
UK and cross-national studies concerned with children
and families, and children’s services
• Mainly qualitative and mixed methods
• Often addressing sensitive or highly personal topics
(e.g., related to health and family life)
• Often involving potentially vulnerable groups of
participants
(e.g., children in ‘care’)
• Involving direct data collection AND secondary
analysis
My perspective
As a secondary analyst
ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Node:
NOVELLA (Narratives of Varied Everyday Lives and
Linked Approaches)
Led by Ann Phoenix, Institute of Education
www.novella.ac.uk
•
•
Three projects drawing on secondary analysis of existing data
• Families and Food, using archival data including Mass Observation
Archive
Event at Sussex, 20 March 2013
• Family Lives and the Environment, combining secondary analysis of
qualitative interviews from Young Lives with new data collection.
• Parenting Identities and Practices, re-analysing data from two
studies conducted previously by members of the research group (Ann
Phoenix and Julia Brannen)
Collaborative project with NCRM Hub (led by Ros Edwards)
• The possibilities of narrative analysis of paradata in historical
surveys, examining marginal notes in surveys conducted in Peter
Townsend’s Poverty study.
What’s the point?
Purposes of ethics regulation
Protection from risk of harm
• For participants
• For wider populations and communities
• For institutions
(e.g., universities and funding bodies)
• For researchers
• Approving body shares responsibility
• Mechanisms for ongoing advice and support through
the project
Risk inherent in
research relationships
For participants
‘research works because respondents trust us’
(Mauthner 2012, p164)
• Informed consent as an act of trust?
- The decision to share your life and your self
• Can you give informed consent for unknown (unimagined)
future uses?
• Is consent to archiving inevitably consent to
uncertainty?
Given this, what are the researchers’ responsibilities?
Risk in research
relationships
Anonymity and identifiability
- Small samples?
- Recognisable characteristics of individuals or organisations?
- Case based approaches combining information?
- Contextual data generating meaning and identifiability?
- Potential for combining datasets to give rise to identifiability?
How would a participant feel, reading what you’ve written?
28 June 2016
Chains of trust…
From participants?
From data collection?
• Participant trusts interviewer
• Interviewer trusts research team
• Research team and host institution trusts archive
and/or future researchers
• Future researchers trust original research
Given this, what are the researchers’ responsibilities?
Risk in research
relationships
For original researchers
• Keeping promises to participants
- Intended uses?
• Risks of reputational damage to researchers, participants
and communities?
- Misunderstanding of contexts (spatial, historical)
- Misunderstanding of original aims
Given this, what are the researchers’ responsibilities?
28 June 2016
Whose data are they
anyway?
• Data as ‘global commodities’?
(Parry and Mauthner, 2004, p140)
• Impact of legislation such as Freedom of Information Act
- Stirling University vs. Philip Morris Tobacco (2011)
28 June 2016
What’s the point of ethics
regulation?
To provide a prompt and a framework for
reflection and planning in relation to ethics
To help ensure that publicly funded research
achieves societal benefit, and avoids doing harm
To support the development and execution of
high quality research
Data sharing fits with all these objectives, but…
Ethics as reflexive process
 Perhaps especially within social science research,
ethical practice is reflexive, situated, negotiated
• Not a ‘formula’ to comply with, or an imperative
• Complexities necessitate reflection and planning for
the unexpected
• Relationships are at the centre of ethical research
practice
• The relative invisibility of research relationships in secondary
analysis necessitates extra care and attention