Trust me, I‘m a researcher: Experiences of archiving data

1. Trust me, I‘m aresearcher: Experiences of archiving data Bogusia Temple, B.A., MPhil., PhD Professor of Health and Social Care Research

2. The Research Language and identity in the narratives of Polish people • 30 interviews in Greater Manchester • RA recent migrant, PI second generation Polish • Focus on methodological issues in cross language research and substantive focus on identity and language RES-000-22-2187

3. My views of secondary data/re-use • Much cross language research is already secondary in that it has been collected/translated by others (Temple, Edwards, & Alexander, C. (2006) Forum: Qualitative Social Research • I re-analysis my own data, analyse in groups, used signed consent and no signed consent • Importance of context

4. Faculty Ethics Committee Approval • Anonymity and confidentiality issues and formal signed consent • Permission to archive subject to anonymising data • BSA guidelines used

5. Ethics statement • 34) The anonymity and privacy of those who participate in the research process should be respected. Personal information concerning research participants should be kept confidential. In some cases it may be necessary to decide whether it is proper or appropriate even to record certain kinds of sensitive information.35) Where possible, threats to the confidentiality and anonymity of research data should be anticipated by researchers. The identities and research records of those participating in research should be kept confidential whether or not an explicit pledge of confidentiality has been given.

6. In practice… • Federation of Poles in Great Britain versus Daily Mail • Lost government data – refusals and withdrawal – trust is not automatic and not assumed • Tensions between recent migrants and established Polonia and negative views of English and other communities • Data given to RA was intended to be in-depth and within contexts of people’s lives – specific individual’s referred to in social networks to illustrate views

7. Therefore… • Constant reassurances re anonymity and confidentiality – who will see it? Trust an issue • Very specific data that could be traced back e.g. public disagreement with neighbour, tensions in setting up a football club, experiences of marrying a Muslim man - “saturated with identifying markers” (McLeod 1996) • Henderson (2007) “jigsaw” of interviews • Surprising detail - RA part of community and trust built up in research by PI? Do we ‘tone it down’? Re-focus? • Assumption that a waiver would be appropriate rather than stopping flow or avoiding specific interviews or substantial editing

8. Choices… • Contact participants and re-negotiate consent • Faculty Ethics approval needed to change terms • Mobile migrants over summer period • Changing terms of interview after data collected – raising suspicion • Possibility of refusal and withdrawal – this was specified as possible at any point up to report submission – reanalyse data? • Do I take out the data about other identifiable people? • “Extended trust” – not within my gift • Anonymise data – how? Issues of data quality

9. A rock and a hard place… • Future research with community – need to disseminate to users • Position of RA - Moore (2007) and visibility of researcher and ethical issues undertheorised. Smythe and Murray – unique epistemology (2000)? • Concerned if data not passed on no future grants and difficult position in university “ So despite the almost obsessive attention to context in the literature on reuse, there has been little attention to the institutional context within which this debate has emerged.” (Moore 2007)

10. Changes since… • Discussion within Ethics Committee of anonymity and data protection issues – consent to be identified? Strengthen statements about how data will be used in future • Own Ethics Committee?

11. Issues • Future research – • groups with split consent? • Individual interviews and re-analysis with part dataset? • Wary of collecting such detailed narratives • Encourage reading of own narratives? Cost? • Different kind of data?

12. Context within my research • “….qualitative data are not meaningful in isolation from the specific contexts and frameworks of interpretation of their production.”(Dicks 2007) • “recontextualising, and reconstructing, data” (Moore 2007) • Methodological data should be effectively linked into empirical data-sets (Dicks 2007) – methodology as part of context, incl reflexive aspects of relationships • costs for projects (Dicks 2007; Henderson 2007) • Language as context – “linguistic ethnography” incl non-verbal clues