Qualitative Research Data, Archiving

Although publicly funded social science data archives have provided repositories for machine-readable datasets since the 1960s, there had been no similar initiative for preserving social science research data in other media, primarily that generated by qualitative research methods. As a result, although huge resources have been devoted to qualitative interviews and ethnographic, case and anthropological studies, the data are often inaccessible, untraceable or have been destroyed. Results from surveys of United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant holders across all social science disciplines back to the 1960s suggest that, after completing their research projects, about two-thirds of researchers store their data, either at home or at work, very few archive their data, and about a fifth destroy their material.