Scaling Up Responsibly: Connecting Communities of Practice

This book has explored the connections between qualitative data reuse, big social research, and data curation. I reviewed existing literature to identify the key issues of context, data quality and trustworthiness, data comparability, informed consent, privacy and confidentiality, and intellectual property and data ownership. Then I interviewed qualitative researchers, big social researchers, and data curators to further dive into each key issue and arrive at new insights about how domain differences affect each community of practice’s viewpoints, different strategies that researchers and curators use to ensure responsible practice, and different perspectives on data curation. This chapter outlines key contributions of the research, ideas for future work, and closing thoughts about scaling up qualitative research.