
Transcript 6
I think having a clear data management plan in research, and also to help you try and complete your PhD within three years or close to three years, if you can manage, I think it is very helpful to know and what you want from your data? So to sit down and think about what sort of data do I need? Where will I get it from? What might be the risks and problems of me getting that data? Then be able to write down how you're going to make use of that data can be very helpful because you can refer back to it back later as you are going through things.
I probably didn't do as much data management planning as I could have done. I did a of very good sort of project proposal for place, an initial research proposal, I potentially would have probably benefited from spending a bit more time about what data sets could I use and how I was going to use them. I knew roughly where they were, where they were out there. I didn't at any time spend any time, perhaps enough time, sitting there explicitly thinking, well, what might I use that socio-demographic data for example with what and how am I going to use it? Is there too much? I spent a lot of time exploring lots of data, perhaps, a little bit haphazardly at times, and I think possibly I lost a bit of time for that but I got most efficient information out that of it but I think if I sat down and actually planned that a little bit more about how I was going to use the various sort of explanatory data I was going to put alongside my crime data, my vandalism data, I might have been a little bit more efficient about how I’d use my data.
I was very good at planning how I was going to get my sensitive data and thinking about that but perhaps not so good about planning out how I was going to use the data I was going to use alongside it. And I think there are huge advantages in planning out both of those things.
I also think as part of your data management planning process there can be a value in doing some exploratory special data analysis if you are working with special data in advance. So actually spending a bit of time, if you’ve got say some data you can get hold of easily, spend a little bit of time working with that data looking at what kind of scales it’s available at, looking at what kind of border data you can get, if you’ve got a particular study area in mind look at the various borders that you’ve got for that area and how they match and a bit of... it’s building in a bit of exploratory analysis with data that’s easier to get perhaps before you chase the data that’s hard to get could be quite useful. Because it can throw at just looking at data that’s readily available can sometime throw up issues that you may find when you’ve got to get hold of more sensitive data. So I think there’s a role for almost sort of prototyping or exploratory data analysis or other planning looking at what is available to you as part of your planning process.
And finally if you’ve got a management plan be prepared to be flexible with it some things will happen that you don’t expect to. So I see data management planning as an ongoing process, you may need to revisit your plan, you need to rewrite your plan, you may need to add addendums to your plan. Because things will change, challenges will come up that you don’t expect and when that comes you may need to kind of revisit how you’re thinking about holding your data. So, I think that some form of planning and consideration of how you’re going to look after your data, how you’re going to publish your data – what might be issues with that. And finally how long are you going to hold onto to your data and what you’re going to do with it at the end. Because that matters too because if you’ve got very sensitive data are you expecting it to sit with your university for years and what would happen after you’ve left? And you need to think a little about that side of it too so this data that you’re collecting, what will you do with it at the end of the project?
And perhaps a final thing also associated to that is, what are all the things you might want to do with this data that you’ve collected? Because one of the issues you can sometimes run into and it’s certainly I have something I ran into it in my masters process I was wary of because I’d run into it on my masters process and PhD processes: if you get to the end of the project and you want to use the data for something but you haven’t already got permission to get use it for that purpose it can be much harder to get it at the end of the project. If at the start of the project you think: Well I’m a PhD student I might want to publish some papers, I’m going to write a PhD, I’m going to present to conferences, I might even write a book. So if you’re at that point when you get your data say, ‘I might use the data for all these purposes’ and be clear about that at the point you get your data then you’re not going to have to go back later on perhaps when people have moved on. I mean, one thing I found with the police is that personnel change very, very fast you might struggle to find the same people again, so if you’ve got someone signed off that says, yes, it’s fine for you to use the data in these ways, then you don’t necessarily need to go back later and say, ‘Ooh I’ve just been selected I’ve got chance of giving a paper at such and such a conference, can I use your data?’ And then struggling to find someone to get hold of to get permission for that or worse place them saying, ‘No.’ If you’ve thought about that in advance as part of your management planning process it means that when you get to the end of your project not only have you hopefully created it in a timely manner but you can use the information you’ve got for further on in your new career.