Archiving and sharing qualitative, sensitive research data from political science research: The research data center Qualiservice.

January 25, 2024 10:59 AM

from Paula Lein

Qualitative political science research data is generally sensitive and is often based on a close relationship of trust between researchers and research participants. For example, participation in research projects in authoritarian regimes and the resulting personal research data are associated with particular risks for the research subjects. At the same time, however, this research data is rich, unique and often generated in research fields that are difficult to access. For this reason, long-term archiving that also enables subsequent scientific use should be considered on a regular basis - even if a large proportion of the material cannot be made fully accessible to the public for legal and/or ethical reasons. In order to protect research participants, high standards for archiving this research data and special protective procedures are therefore necessary. If researchers want to make their sensitive data available for scientific re-use, they need an appropriate archiving environment, which Qualiservice provides as part of the Specialized Information Service (FID) Political Science - Pollux.

You can find the whole article in the DVPW-Blog (German only)