Past CQMI Events

Effective Data Management For Grant Applications

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the way social scientists can do research, moving much of it online. This short workshop introduced practical advice for data management of social science projects, including organization, documentation and metadata, data security, and participant confidentiality, with a particular focus on the implications of doing research online. As the situation gets more promising for in-person or hybrid field work, we discussed the benefits and trade-offs involved.

The workshop covered best practices for data management and writing data management plans that are now commonly required for external grant applications. Looking at online research and in-person field work, we discussed strategies for recording and transcribing online interviews, effectively working with and saving web pages, and identifying collections of primary materials online.

Sebastian Karcher is the Associate Director of the Qualitative Data Repository and Research Assistant Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. His main interests are in research transparency, management and curation of qualitative data, and the integration of technology into scholarly workflows.

Social science is undergoing a transparency revolution. Funders, journals, other researchers, and the public increasingly expect research data and methods to be shared. In this practical workshop, you will learn how to plan your research from the beginning to be able to meet such demands. We will focus on key considerations for data management of social science projects such as organization, documentation and metadata, data security, and participant confidentiality. Relatedly, we will discuss how to approach informed consent with human participants in the context of data sharing and will present informed consent templates to use as a starting point. Additionally, we will review various on- and off-campus resources that can help in planning and implementing one’s data management. 

An Introduction to Webscraping using R.

October 3, 2019

Attendees packed the Moynihan computer lab to capacity for a hands-on workshop that provided users the basic tools for automatically scraping webpage content using the rvest R package. Taught by QDR’s associate director Sebastian Karcher, the session included a brief introduction to CSS/xpath and the structure of websites, followed by teaching participants to write a script to collect structured information from multiple pages on a website. Participants used their newly acquired tools to scrape information about British Members of Parliament (such as constituency, party, email, and social media presence) into a dataset. Sebastian tweeted some figures based on this dataset after the workshop.

The Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (IQMR)

The institute seeks to enable participants to create and critique methodologically sophisticated qualitative research designs, including case studies, tests of necessity or sufficiency, and narrative or interpretive work. It explores the techniques, uses, strengths, and limitations of these methods, while emphasizing their relationships with alternative approaches.

Crafting Informed Consent for Transparent Research 

Graduate students and faculty interested in learning how to collect social science data from human participants that can be shared ethically and legally are invited to this practical workshop. The workshop will discuss how a nuanced informed consent process can empower the people we interview and grant them agency over decisions regarding their information, while also facilitating academic openness.The core of the workshop will consist of an hour of hands-on work centered around the participants’ own consent scripts (or/and IRB application more broadly).

Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) #2 

Workshop participants will discuss their experiences using ATI to annotate their articles, and reading articles that have been annotated using ATI. The goal of the workshops is to evaluate all aspects of ATI, identifying the ways in which it enhances scholarship and the challenges employing it presents, and considering how the ATI approach and technology can be further developed. The first workshop focused on articles based on qualitative evidence that were recently published, or are forthcoming, in an academic journal, and that authors retrospectively annotated using ATI. 

A Tale of Two Data Projects: Curation at the Qualitative Data Repository by QDR

November 7, 2018:

The webinar tells the story of two data projects deposited with QDR, from the initial contact between depositors and the repository, through a variety of curation steps, to their eventual publication. We highlight details of QDR’s close interaction with researchers during deposit, and discuss how, through the curation process, QDR helps scholars to address the challenges posed by sharing and publishing qualitative data. Data librarians and other data professionals will gain in-depth insight into the curation of qualitative data, the value added by specialized curation, and how organizations and researchers can benefit from working with QDR.

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Professor of International Relations, Robert Rubinstein taught the basics of ATLAS.ti, a Computer Assisted Qualitative Data AnalysiS (or CAQDAS) application for multi-method and qualitative data management and analysis. Training participants either discovered for or expanded their knowledge of this powerful tool. ATLAS.ti is used to facilitate qualitative data collection and analysis, and management -- whether text or multi-media, across multiple documents, with linking, visualization, tracking codes and more.

For those that are interested in using ATLAS.ti for current or future projects, the Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry (CQMI) holds five ATLAS.ti (v7) licenses that can be used remotely from any computer. For instructions, please visit our Remote Lab at CQMI page

APSA Annual Meeting: Democracy and Its Discontents 

The Organized Section on Qualitative and Multi-Method Research seeks to promote research and training focused on the several branches of methodology associated with the qualitative tradition, broadly defined. The section also strives for an integrated understanding of these diverse methods and of their relationship to other branches of methodology, including quantitative methods. Please visit our APSA section for more details. 

Technical Solutions to Advance Evaluation and Replication in the Social Sciences: What’s New, What's Next

The workshop is the fourth in a series on "Developing and Implementing Data Policies: Conversations Between Journals and Data Repositories." The series is designed to promote discussion among social science journal editors, personnel from data repositories, data librarians, and other relevant constituencies about current approaches to data citation, management, and archiving.

The Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (IQMR)

The institute seeks to enable participants to create and critique methodologically sophisticated qualitative research designs, including case studies, tests of necessity or sufficiency, and narrative or interpretive work. It explores the techniques, uses, strengths, and limitations of these methods, while emphasizing their relationships with alternative approaches.

Protecting People, Sharing Data" Data Sharing and Human Participant Challenges in the Social Sciences

Institutional Research Board (IRB) are charged with helping social scientists conduct research in ways that will protect their human subjects from harm. In that role, IRBs sometimes encourage scholars to withhold – or even destroy – their research data in an effort to prevent even minimal risks of disclosure of private information. As interest in data sharing and research transparency has grown, IRBs and other institutions in the social science ecosystem – in particular funding organizations and academic journals – have engaged in rich discussions about how to continue protecting research participants while simultaneously making academic research more open.

Workshop participants will discuss their experiences using ATI to annotate their articles, and reading articles that have been annotated using ATI. The goal of the workshops is to evaluate all aspects of ATI, identifying the ways in which it enhances scholarship and the challenges employing it presents, and considering how the ATI approach and technology can be further developed. The first workshop focused on articles based on qualitative evidence that were recently published, or are forthcoming, in an academic journal, and that authors retrospectively annotated using ATI. 

Grad Research Skills Series- Research Transparency and Data Management: Principles and Practices

November 14, 2017

Colin Elman, Director of the Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry and Qualitative Data Repository, and Sebastian Karcher, Associate Director of the Qualitative Data Repository, led the workshop by providing a short overview over recent debates around research transparency, focusing on the theoretical and practical justifications for transparency and data sharing. As the workshop continued it provided hands-on advice on how to conduct transparent research, focusing on data management practices that facilitate transparent research with a particular focus on data management planning in the social sciences. Other topics included writing effective data management plans, working with IRBs, best practices for organizing and storing files, and sharing data.

Introduction to ATLAS.ti (v7)

October 20, 2017

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Professor of International Relations, Robert Rubinstein taught the basics of ATLAS.ti, a Computer Assisted Qualitative Data AnalysiS (or CAQDAS) application for multi-method and qualitative data management and analysis. Training partipants either discovered for or expanded their knowledge of this powerful tool. ATLAS.ti is used to facilitate qualitative data collection and analysis, and management -- whether text or multi-media, across multiple documents, with linking, visualization, tracking codes and more.

For those that are interested in using ATLAS.ti for current or future projects, the Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry (CQMI) holds five ATLAS.ti (v7) licenses that can be used remotely from any computer. For instructions, please visit our Remote Lab at CQMI page.

Protecting People, Sharing Data Workshop

Members of the data repository and IRB communities gathered in New York City to discuss social science research. Workshop participants explained their thoughts and opinions on strategies that are expanding the potential for the ethical sharing of data generated through interacting with human participants. The discussions were used to formulate better practices with regard to the promise and praxis of data sharing.

Data Under Constraint was the third workshop in the Data-PASS series "Developing and Implementing Data Policies: Conversations Between Journals and Data Repositories." The series was designed to promote discussion among social science journal editors, personnel from data repositories, data librarians, and other relevant constituencies about current approaches to data citation, management, and archiving. In this workshop, the discussion focused on the editors and authors dealing with data that are under constraint – e.g., data that were generated through interaction with human participants, are classified, are under copyright, or have some other proprietary content. Authors of course must comply with relevant agreements they signed, ethical commitments they made, and applicable laws. Therefore, participants shared opinions and strategies on how journal editors could facilitate transparency under these conditions, and how much transparency they should encourage.

March 23, 2017

The Open House invited university community members to learn about the center's collaborations, innovations in annotation technologies, and other resources available to faculty, staff, and students through CQMI. The Open House featured services and advances in data publishing, reuse, and policy resources through the Qualitative Data Repository; data management planning consultancy and webinars; innovative bibliographic resources, teaching modules, syllabi resources; access to computer assisted qualitative data analysis applications; the two Cambridge book series, Strategies for Social Inquiry and Methods for Social Inquiry; and, finally, training opportunities and workshops.