The University of Pennsylvania Libraries is an institutional member of the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR), a dedicated archive for storing and sharing qualitative and multi-method data. The QDR is hosted by the Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry, a unit of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
Our membership supports the curation and preservation of data projects deposited by Penn faculty, students, and research staff. Through this benefit, individual researchers can consult with experts in qualitative data curation, including discussions about disclosure issues, metadata creation, and more. Researchers should start early in consulting with QDR, ideally at the beginning of a project before data collection or during the data management planning stage for any grant submissions. If you are applying for a large or multi-year grant, please consult with QDR before designating them as a repository. There may be additional costs for large-scale or multi-year projects.
If you are a researcher working in qualitative methods, please contact Lynda Kellam (LibraryRDDS@pobox.upenn.edu) for more information.
ICPSR maintains and provides access to thousands of quantitative and qualitative studies, surveys, and datasets in the social sciences. To share your data with ICPSR, use the secure data deposit form at this link. Both public-use and restricted-use data can be deposited in the ICPSR archive. Sharing your data with ICPSR is free. For best practices in preparing your data for deposit, see ICPSR's Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving.
Examples of datasets in ICPSR - find qualitative methods ones
The UK Data Archive maintains QualiBank, a catalog that enables enables searching and browsing of qualitative data, interviews and open-ended questions in the UKDA. U.S. researchers have access to six major collections, including the Pioneers of Social Research, 1996-2018.
This LibGuide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
While qualitative data researchers have fewer options for sharing data than quantitative, there are places to both archive and discover qualitative data. We have memberships in the Qualitative Data Repository and ICPSR, both of which have experts who can help you ensure your data can be shared in a way that is mindful of privacy issues and disclosure concerns.
Get in touch with us early to start the process.
