Research data management and data sharing of qualitative data

Research data management (RDM) aims to support researchers in handling their research data. It has become an integral part of research practice and offers numerous services. However, the provided guidance and tools are often generic and the special features of qualitative research, such as the openness of the research process, the sensitivity and density of references and the heterogeneity of the materials, are rarely taken into account. As a result, RDM templates and instruments do not fit in practice and qualitative researchers have difficulties in applying them. To close this gap, QualidataNet - the network for qualitative data (www.qualidatanet.org) provides a research data management portfolio for qualitative research. QualidataNet is a service developed and operated as part of the National Research Data Infrastructure in Germany in the Consortium for Social, Behavioral, Educational and Economic Data (KonsortSWD-NFDI4society). The presentation looks at the special features of RDM of qualitative data and shows ways of addressing these in practice. The special handling of data protection and copyright issues in qualitative social research is considered as well as special features of the research data life cycle for qualitative research. We address how qualitative data can be anonymized and documented so that as much social science-relevant information as possible is preserved for subsequent scientific use. Guided by the idea of an ethical RDM, the portfolio aims to enable researchers to ethically reflect on their actions in the field. It is clear that, in addition to solutions that take into account the openness and heterogeneity of qualitative data, the flexibility of the instruments, ethical reflection skills and dataset- and project-specific aspects are key to supporting qualitative researchers in generating FAIR research data that can be used sustainably.