Comparison of Issues and Data Curation Strategies

This chapter synthesizes the literature reviewed in Chaps. 3 and 4, comparing key issues relating to qualitative data reuse and big social research, and highlighting data curation practices that support epistemologically sound, ethical, and legal use and reuse of qualitative and big social data. The literature reviewed in Chaps. 3 and 4 reveals that issues in qualitative data reuse and big social research are similar, but their respective communities of practice are under-connected. Both types of data present the issues of context, data quality and trustworthiness, data comparability, informed consent, privacy and confidentiality, and intellectual property and data ownership. However, despite these similarities, big social research has not yet been widely framed as a form of qualitative data reuse, and qualitative data reuse has rarely been conducted on a large scale. Qualitative data reuse is a more established practice, and thus there are more developed data curation strategies to support responsible qualitative data sharing and reuse; even so, many issues in qualitative data reuse are still unresolved. In comparison, data curation for big social data is less well-developed, and there is little consensus about data curation strategies to support responsible big social research.