Alexandra Stam/Pablo Diaz
Data management: from planning to day-to-day implementation

This optional workshop will be held on Friday and Saturday, the week before the regular workshops.

Alexandra Stam is a senior researcher at FORS since 2009, leading the data promotion group within the Data and Research Information Services division. She has several years of experience teaching data management. Prior to this, she worked several years at the University of Dundee in Scotland as a teaching fellow and research assistant. Trained as a geographer, her research interests are on new forms of migration, particularly student mobility, and marriage migration. She completed a PhD in 2011 on 'marriage migration and the geographies of love', combining both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Pablo Diaz is a postdoctoral fellow at FORS since 2016. He works for the Data and Research Information Services division. He is particularly interested in the management of sensitive data (consent, anonymization, archiving, sharing, etc.). Trained as a political scientist, he completed a thesis on public policy transfers in developing countries. He has been involved in various international projects on topics such as partisan mobilization, standardization processes, social protection and international civil society.

Workshop contents and objectives

Within the context of Open data, more and more funders, like the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), require data management plans (DMPs) to be submitted along with project proposals as a condition for obtaining research funding. This new imperative raises many questions among the research community regarding how to draft a data management plan, but also how to apply data management in day-to-day research. Far more than an administrative formality, data management represents an opportunity to engage seriously with important methodological and epistemological questions that directly influence how research is conducted and that ultimately increase data quality for researchers and their teams. Good data management does not merely serve the end-goal of data sharing. Rather, it is a pre-requisite for high-quality research, ensuring ethical and legal compliance, but also making sure that data are collected and described in a way that opens their potential.

During this two-day workshop led by FORS, the Swiss Center of Expertise in the Social Sciences, you will learn how to draft a DMP as well as develop some important practical data management skills, such as being able to draft a consent form, identify relevant techniques of data anonymization, develop rules for ensuring data security, and ensuring compliance with ethical and legal requirements.

The format of the workshop will combine both theory and hands-on exercises. During the first day, you will get to develop a DMP based on your own research needs, whether you are at the start or towards the end of your research project. The second day will focus on developing practical skills, both for quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The format will allow for some flexibility depending on the interests of the group.

Topics covered

1. Open data and research ethics
• Engage with data management from a theoretical, epistemological and methodological point of view
• Learn about research ethics in the context of Open Data
2. Data management planning
• Understand the various fields of a standard data management plan, as well as their relevance for your research
• Learn how to draft a data management plan based on your own research needs
3. Data management in day-to-day research
• Develop skills in the following domains:
• data organization and security issues
• data documentation
• ethics and legal issues (getting consent)
• data preparation (anonymization)
• data publication, preservation, FAIR principles
• data sharing
• Learn about existing tools and resources

Prerequisites

No particular prerequisites are needed for this course. It is open to all researchers in the social sciences interested in data management planning and its implementation.