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Re-Using Qualitative Longitudinal Data: The Timescapes Initiative Bren Neale

Re-Using Qualitative Longitudinal Data: The Timescapes Initiative Bren Neale University of Leeds – Timescapes IRC /IQDA workshop: Re-Using Qualitative Data University of Maynooth , 22 June 2012. Overview. The Timescapes programme:

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Re-Using Qualitative Longitudinal Data: The Timescapes Initiative Bren Neale

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  1. Re-Using Qualitative Longitudinal Data: The Timescapes Initiative Bren Neale University of Leeds – Timescapes IRC /IQDA workshop: Re-Using Qualitative Data University of Maynooth,22 June 2012

  2. Overview • The Timescapes programme: • Qualitative longitudinal (QL) data sharing and re-use • The Timescapes archive • Strategic development, scope and holdings, data discovery • Stakeholder model: • integrates research and archiving, crosses the primary/secondary divide.

  3. The Timescapes Initiative • Five year programme of QL research, funded by ESRC (2007-12) • Aim to advance QL methods, and build data resources to facilitate data sharing and re-use • Achieved through a network of empirical projects, the creation of the Timescapes archive and a programme to advance and showcase secondary analysis of QL data

  4. The need to build data resources • Rationale: In 2007, only a fraction of qualitative data re-use occurred through national archives – more sharing was done informally • Hardly any QL data sets were archived or available for re-use – QL research has open ended time frames with no clear point at which primary research ends and secondary begins. • Timescapes funded to rectify this – to build a culture of data sharing, & support ethical re-use

  5. The Value of QL Data • Prospective QL research involves qualitative tracking or ‘walking alongside’ individuals or groups as their lives unfold – life course framework • Enables an understanding of the interior logic of lives, how change is created, lived and experienced, and the agency of individuals in these social processes • Powerful mode of explanation - how/why social change occurs, adds depth to survey evidence • Biography understood into relation to History - Historical value of QL data accrues through time

  6. The Timescapes Archive • A multi-media resource of QL data drawn primarily from our core empirical projects + data from affiliated projects. • A specialist satellite of the UK Data Archive, developed in line with national standards for data management and sharing and with data copied to the national resource for preservation and eventual re-use • A valuable resource, built strategically to link related datasets for sharing and secondary use - by the original team and new research teams. • Facilitates refined thematic searching and retrieval of data across datasets to aid comparative analysis. For example allow for data on fatherhood to be retrieved and analysed across the life course. • .

  7. The Timescapes Datasets Eight projects on family and personal lives, spanning the life course, common themes and linked fieldwork questions: • Siblings and Friends: children’s lateral relationships • Young Lives and Times: teen to adulthood transitions • The Dynamics of Motherhood: an intergenerational project • Masculinities, Identities and Risk: lives of men and fathers • Work and Family Lives: the changing experiences of ‘young’ families • Intergenerational Exchange: grandparents, exclusion and health • The Oldest Generation: events, relationships, identities in later life • Inventing Adulthoods: an archiving project – development of case histories from a 10 year tracking study of young people from five locations in the UK Data: • Qualitative longitudinal (10+ years) multi-media data • 320 participants in the core study

  8. Timescapes Affiliate Programme

  9. Scope and holdings of Archive • Rich qualitative data: audio files, photos and videos, interview transcripts, diaries, timelines, futures data participant generated data, rich metadata – data about data - field notes, sample characteristics, analytical and descriptive files • Data and metadata generated in consultation with archive team • Data organised and retrievable at transcript level and in waves and case histories to aid complex life history analysis .

  10. These essays can be matched to the NCDS survey data of 11 year olds done in 1969. Extensive quantitative data is available, along with the young people’s essays.

  11. Distinctive features: A stakeholder model of archiving

  12. A Stakeholder model of Archiving. QL data needs specialist curation, based on a close alignment of research and archiving Primary researchers become stakeholders in the resource, encouraged to re-use their own data in the archive, with potential to link to related datasets and increase the robustness of the evidence base – principle of data sharing/linking Stakeholder archiving follows the logic of QL enquiry – it blurs the boundaries between primary and secondary research

  13. Integrating research & archiving • Archiving of QL data as integral part of good research practice, not an administrative ‘hand off’ • Archive supports QL data management planning: (e.g. transcription standards, anonymisation, gold standard metadata): enables temporal analysis while creating archive-ready data. • Archive as a repository for use by original QL researchers; researchers can revisit earlier waves of data and link these to related datasets

  14. Founded on principle of data sharing • Good practice to share data and enable re-use – increasingly unacceptable to assert exclusive ownership of data gathered for the public good • A new status for datasets as important outputs of a project, deserving of kitemarking and acknowledgement in their own right • Collaborative model for sharing data, putting primary and secondary analysts in touch with each other

  15. Secure yet accessible data • Confidentiality and ethical considerations met through • Consent for archiving (95% consent rate, participants broadly support this) • Editing original data (e.g,anonymising) • Controlling access (e.g. Licenses, four levels of access including restricted access – permissions run back to originating team – attractive option for representing ‘real’ lives

  16. Challenges: Triple burden of collection, data management, analysis and re-analysis; implications for resources in project design Effectiveness Has enabled creation of data resources where none existed before – has supported new ethos of data sharing and achieved high success rate in archiving sensitive data and building community of users – circa 100 users Assessing the Stakeholder model

  17. Timescapes@leeds.ac.uk • Visit the Timescapes website for access to the archive, and information on QL methods, ethics, publications, and resources • Timescapes methods guides series – on resources pages of the website

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