Diana Kapiszewski

Data access and research transparency in the qualitative tradition

As an abstract idea, openness is difficult to oppose. Social scientists from every research tradition agree that scholars cannot just assert their conclusions, but must also share their evidentiary basis and explain how they were reached. Yet practice has not always followed this principle. Most forms of qualitative empirical inquiry have taken a minimalist approach to openness, providing only limited information about the research process, and little or no access to the data underpinning findings. What scholars do when conducting research, how they generate data, and how they make interpretations or draw inferences on the basis of those data, are rarely addressed at length in their published research. Even in book-length monographs which have an extended preface and footnotes, it can sometimes take considerable detective work to piece together a picture of how authors arrived at their conclusions.

Transparency in Qualitative Security Studies Research: Standards, Benefits, and Challenges

Discussion about greater openness in the policymaking and academic communities is emerging all around us. In February 2013, for example, the White House issued a broad statement calling on federal agencies to submit concrete proposals for “increasing access to the results of federally funded scientific research.”1 The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act passed the US House of Representatives on 18 November 2013 (it has not yet been voted on in the Senate).2 In academia, multiple questions are arising about how to preserve and make accessible the “deluge of (digital) data” scientific research produces and how to make research more transparent.3 For instance, on 13–14 June 2013, a meeting to address “Data Citation and Research Transparency Standards for the Social Sciences” was convened by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and attended by opinion leaders from across the social science disciplines.4 In November 2014, ICPSR hosted “Integrating Domain Repositories into the National Data Infrastructure,” a follow-up workshop that gathered together representatives from emerging national infrastructures for data and publications. Within the discipline of political science, the American Political Science Association (APSA) in October 2012 amended its Guide to Professional