THURSDAY JUNE 20, 2024. 12:00 - 13:00 BST

Seminar recording: The seminar recording is hosted in the Panopto video platform (LSHTM users only) and Data Compass repository.

Qualitative research can provide a rich understanding of people’s lived experience that goes beyond what is possible through quantitative approaches. However, the sharing of complex qualitative outputs in a form that maintains research context and protects participant confidentiality remains a challenge for many research studies.

In this seminar, Kahryn Hughes, Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, will consider the key ethical challenges for the reuse and sharing of qualitative research data. She will highlight the ethical value of qualitative data preservation and archiving, as part of a broader ethical temporal sensibility towards social research data and integrity. She explores the rise of qualitative data re-use in the context of the ‘data turn’ and explores how the qualities of qualitative data present distinctive challenges for and within the global drift towards open science and open access. With particular attention to questions of how and why ethical concerns may change over time, she explores what the implications of qualitative data re-use might be for current research practice. In so doing, she explains how social and qualitative researchers can achieve good practice by attending to questions of data integrity and legacy. She will signpost to relevant resources to support good practice in the preparation and organisation of qualitative datasets for the purposes of reuse.