Making interview transcripts open: Preliminary results from a scoping review

Making research data open is recognised as improving both the quality of individual research outputs, and the effectiveness of the perpetuated ‘self-correcting’ goals of research overall. Many funders now mandate open data as a condition of their grants. This can be difficult for qualitative researchers, whose data poses different obstacles to the quantitative data that these policies seem to be aimed at. This pre-print represents the preliminary results of a scoping review into the practical steps that qualitative researchers can take towards opening their transcripts. From each included article, we extracted specific actions that a researcher could take to overcome an identified barrier. From these, we constructed eight themes: confidentiality, consent, misappropriation of data, context, copyright, IRB approval, researcher distress and time and money. We have presented the preliminary findings in the form of a table based ‘tool’, organised via these themes, which we used to develop our own data management plan.