Qualarch

Archiving qualitative data has several advantages. It allows posing and answering new research questions with historical data beyond longitudinal studies and time series comparisons. In turn, such an archive would also foster further methodological developments and inter-disciplinarity in the social and human sciences and beyond. In Europe, several countries have already established such qualitative data archives (e.g., United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany). The Qualarch project investigated the types of qualitative data that could be archived and that was already been archived and made available in Austria. We examined how Austrian academics store their qualitative data and how they feel about the secondary use of this data (e.g., their experiences, doubts and problems encountered with secondary use of qualitative data). We organised three Workshops in Graz, Salzburg and Vienna, inviting academics across disciplines to discuss these issues in detail. The Workshops focused on the advantages of qualitative data archiving and the secondary use of data. The feasibility study was financed by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research and implemented by the Department of Methods in the Social Sciences and WISDOM .

[January 2008 - June 2008]