Public ideas for crime and criminal justice research – an open dataset from Ireland (Creating our Future)

Creating our Future was a Government of Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland initiative that ‘provided an opportunity for everyone in Ireland to give ideas on how to make our country better for all’ by allowing the public to submit research ideas that might ‘inspire researchers to make a better future for Ireland.’

Subtitled ‘a national conversation on research in Ireland’, Creating our Future received 18,062 online submissions (Jul-Nov 2021). All submissions were published in a searchable database in August 2022, alongside authors’ stated age ranges and counties of residence (when provided). A thematic category (e.g. ‘Politics and Policymaking’, ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’, ‘Health and Social Care’, ‘Digital World’, etc.) was also assigned to each submission after ‘expert analysis was complete to facilitate public use’ (see ‘Information on Submissions’ here).

Funded by the National Open Research Forum (which itself was funded by the Higher Education Authority), partners and research assistants from the Criminal justice Open Research Dialogue (CORD) Partnership used the secondary dataset from Creating our Future to create a subset of data including 245 submissions which related to crime or criminal justice issues. Details about the process and ideas for the analysis of this dataset can be found on the website of the European Network for Open Criminology (link to be added shortly).