European Science Editing 48: e77781, doi: 10.3897/ese.2022.e77781

Challenges of qualitative data sharing in social sciences

Tanja Vuckovic Juros^‡

‡ Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

Corresponding author: Tanja Vuckovic Juros ( tanja.vuckovic.juros@gmail.com )

Academic editor: Ksenija Bazdaric

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation: Vuckovic Juros T (2022) Challenges of qualitative data sharing in social sciences. European Science Editing 48: e77781. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2022.e77781

Abstract

Open science offers hope for new accountability and transparency in social sciences. Nevertheless, it still fails to fully consider the complexities of qualitative research, as exemplified by a reflection on sensitive qualitative data sharing. As a result, the developing patterns of rewards and sanctions promoting open science raise concern that quantitative research, whose “replication crisis” brought the open science movement to life, will benefit from “good science” re-evaluations at the expense of other research epistemologies, despite the necessity to define accountability and transparency in social sciences more widely and not to conflate those with either reproducibility or data sharing.

Keywords

Accountability, open science, qualitative research, sensitive data, transparency