What is the guide designed to do?

It provides guidelines, supporting information and exemplars to assist researchers in making their qualitative data, designs and methodological decisions available for re-use and archiving.

Who will find this Guide useful?

This Guide is aimed at those researchers (here termed ‘originators’) who are planning to make their qualitative data-records available for later re-analysis by other researchers, whom they will probably not know (here termed ‘re-users’). It is therefore aimed at originators, not re-users – i.e. not aimed at those who are seeking guidance on how to re-use others’ existing data (although re-users might well find some of the discussion and illustration useful).

The guide is not, either, aimed at those who are planning to re-use their own data. Whilst those who wish to re-use their own data or those generated in a team, may find it useful, the Guide is primarily aimed at those who would deposit their data in archives accessible by researchers unconnected with the original study.

In preparing their data for subsequent re-use by others, researchers may:

1. be currently initiating or progressing the assembly of a data-set for a project underway or planned;
2. have already completed a project and now wish to review how usable it will subsequently be for other researchers, possibly through making amendments or additions to the data-set for this purpose.

The guide seeks to provide useful information that for both these groups.

Clearly, there are potentially many different kinds of qualitative project that result in the creation of datasets for archiving. What follows will be of broad relevance to most kinds of fieldwork-based study design, such as ethnography, interview-based and case-study research.

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