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Transcript 9

There is an issue within the social sciences about replicating results of studies that are being carried out. Maybe this is wider than just the social sciences, because in research you would like to enable other researchers to understand and to follow your work, to carry out additional improvements to your work once you are done, and also to perhaps check whether what you have done is adequate and at the highest level that can be reached. And I think that nowadays with the software that we have and with the data management tools that we have … and some of them are provided by the universities … some you can download free sometimes even. But these tools actually provide researchers nowadays with a great opportunity to keep track of all of the procedures that they carry out through their analysis. And it is just as important to know how to use them and to really use them throughout the work in order to enable other researchers to then be able to look at your work, to check it if they would like to and, more importantly even, to continue from the point that you reached and carry this work even further.

And I actually spend a lot of time in order to document my work, not just because I would like to make it possible for researchers in the future to look at it and to maybe continue the thread of work that I’m carrying out, but also for my own purposes. Because, as I’m sure many of you know, doing a PhD is something that takes at least three years and it is something that evolves within time. Sometimes you would like in your second year to go back and look at things that you were doing in your first year, to revise them or to understand what you have done. So it’s very, very important, I guess, to keep track and to always make notes of the things that you carried out of the procedures, the analytical procedures that you carried out and you can do them with the software that is provided now … that is available nowadays.

Also, not just to keep track of what procedures you were executing but also why you have executed this specific analytical procedure. Because when you are actually doing the research and you have very much invested in the data analysis phase, you know exactly why you are doing this. It’s very clear in your mind, it’s very vivid. You do it every day for hours a day. But, after several months when you’ve moved on, it wouldn’t necessarily be as fresh as it was. So, sometimes you may even forget why exactly you used this method. It’s very important when you’re going back to the documentation that you yourself created, to be able to find there the reason why you have used this procedure, for what purposes, and to revise it and understand whether this is something that you would like now to use as well, or you would like to change it, and to use other methodological or analytical procedures.

So in a way I think this is part of doing a PhD, also to be responsible for how you document your own work, for yourself and for others. Specifically in my case I do invest a lot of time and energy in this part of my studies and I guess that if someone would like now to replicate my work, then all this person would have to do is access the files that I created because, of course, when I first started I downloaded the data files from the archive. But then I just started to modify them in the merge files and create new variables out of the ones that were already there. So my dataset now is nowhere similar to the one that I started with. So this person who would like to replicate my work would have to get this file, which I am happy to provide of course. There’s nothing there that should be under a specific licence – it’s all free for public and academic use. This person would also have to gain access to the syntax files that I created. Again, I don’t see this as any … there are no problems there. Someone who gets these files can immediately just run them over and have the result that I created or I produced. And, of course, the thesis itself would provide a person that would like to replicate my work with the theoretical considerations that are actually behind all of this analytical work, because of course the analytical work that I carried out is based on a theoretical framework. So I don’t think that just taking the dataset and the syntax and running over it would really provide you with much. You would also have to look at the theoretical background from which these analytical procedures were carried out or were influenced.

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PILOT - Writing a data management plan by Edina, University of Edinburgh modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/introduction.html