SSHOC Workshop: Data Management Planning and Overcoming Challenges in Social Sciences Data Sharing

Date: 14 to 15 February 2022 Location: Online

Event Overview

A Data Management Plan helps achieve optimal handling, organising, documenting and enhancing of research data. It is particularly important for facilitating data sharing, ensuring the sustainability and accessibility of data in the long-term and allowing data to be reused for future research. For the effective management of data, planning must start when research is being designed and needs to consider both how data will be managed during the research and how they will be shared afterwards. In this two days online workshop, we discussed the main challenges of data sharing in social sciences and how these can be overcome by implementing best data management planning practices. The workshop covered the following topics:

• Challenges in data sharing for social science projects
• Data collection and assessment of existing sources
• Documentation, metadata and quality assurance
• Ethical and legal context
• Storage, backup and preservation
• Facilitating data sharing, project roles and responsibilities

The workshop was delivered online and combined lectures and presentations with individual and practical exercises and group discussions. At the end of the workshop, participants gained a better understanding of research data management best practices, particularly on how a Data Management Plan facilitates compliance with data protection legislation and data sharing. The attendees were provided with further resources including readings and open source tools to ease and enable data sharing.

Speakers

Cristina Magder manages the UK Data Service's Data Collections Development and Research Data Management teams at the UK Data Archive. She leads the research data management portfolio of support and training for the UK Data Service. Her main teaching interests are data management planning, sharing and archiving data with a specific focus on licencing, data quality assurance, disclosure risk assessment, and reproducibility.

Hina Zahid is the Senior Research Data Services Officer working in the UK Data Service's Research Data Management section based at the UK Data Archive, University of Essex. She leads on the ethical aspects of research data management, sharing and reuse. She works proactively with researchers, and research centres to provide guidance, advice and training to achieve the implementation of good data management practices, and to optimise the sharing and archiving of data for research.

Vlad Voina is the Data Integrity Officer at the UK Data Service. He conducts assessment of data integrity, metadata and disclosure risk for data offered and deposited into the UK Data Service's self-deposit repository, ReShare. He provides external guidance for data owners and depositors on data quality and risk assessment.

Anca Vlad has been part of the collections development and data publishing team at the UK Data Archive for the past 6 years. She has been assisting researchers and data depositors with preparing their data deposits and delivering training on data management, archiving and open access publishing for different audiences.

Maureen Haaker is a scholar in the field of qualitative methodology. She has worked with the UK Data Service for 10 years as a senior qualitative training officer and is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at University of Suffolk. Her work has involved the ingest and digitisation of qualitative data, development of training for the management, deposit, and re-use of qualitative data, and the re-use of qualitative datasets for teaching and learning. She is a key contributor to Sage’s Managing and Sharing Research Data (2nd edition) and Qualitative Secondary Analysis. She is currently completing a PhD in Sociology at University of Essex.