Managing your research data in psychology – an introduction

Stephen Grace and John Murtagh

Contents

1. What is research data?

2. Why is it important now?

3. Research verification

4. Research data loss

5. Data protection, rights & access

6. What next?

1. What is research data?

• “The material underpinning a research assertion”• Not just numbers, not just digital• Anything that leads to publication• Anything that supports conclusions• Research as practice in performance/ creative arts• Data from lab instruments and lab notebooks• Observations, surveys, archival sources• Audio, video, physical objects, even paper

Discussion point:

• What is your research?• What is research data for you?

What is data management?

• Looking after data throughout the data lifecycle from conception to death

• Good documentation and record-keeping• Keeping data safe and possibly confidential• Transfer of responsibility after project ends• Access, preservation and re-use• Destruction• Ultimately: “It’s just good research practice”

2. Why is it important (now)?

Funders want wider access to research they paid for – starting to demand access

http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/policy-and-legal/overview-funders-data-policies

Universities need to look after their research data assets

Data underpins publications

• Growing interest in publishing data papers which can be cited in a similar method to normal papers via Digital Object Identifiers (DOI’s)

• DataCite (www.datacite.org) creates DOIs for research data

• Such papers describe what the data is, how it was collected, methodology, variables, suggested reuse and a link to the actual data

• Get academic credit for sharing data

Open data journals

• Journal of Open Archaeology Data• Journal of Open Public Health Data• Journal of Open Research Software

Deposit somewhere else

• The EPSRC and NERC require that all research publications include a statement on how the supporting data can be accessed.

• Repositories such as Protein Data Bank, EuropePMC and DRYAD are accepting data related to publications

• Research Data Repositories for psychology: • PsychData• Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES)• National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging

Funder policies on your data

• Both the ESRC and the NERC could withhold the final grant payment if data are not properly managed and offered for deposit.

• The BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, NERC and the Wellcome Trust state that costs associated with data management and sharing can be included in grant proposals.

• Secondary Data Analysis Initiative - ESRC funding of £10.8m for reusing existing data sets.

The data lifecycle - Benefits

Image from Journal of Open Psychology Data

3. Research integrity

–Verification of science–Prevention/detection of fraud

Verification of science research

•Movement for greater openness to advance science and society

•The British Medical Journal’s  open data campaign  aims to achieve independent scrutiny of data from clinical trials.

•“we seek to highlight the problems caused by lack of access to data, and we welcome any suggestions on how to take things further.”

•MPs call for Commons committee to examine cost to NHS of missing data in publications. December 2012

Prevention/detection of fraud

Data fraud cases in psychology

• Dirk Smeesters – Erasmus Univeristy social psychologist– Found to have cherry-picked the data to

produce statistically significant results in articles

– retracts two studies, resigns post

• Dirk Stapel – Dutch Social psychologist– fabricated research data. 55 papers and 10

supervised dissertations investigated

Prevention/detection of fraud

Stapel data fraud case - report

• 103 page report by three Dutch universities

• Stapel fabricated data in 55 articles and book chapters. So far, 45 (30 January 2013) have been retracted.

• 10 dissertations by students Stapel supervised were found to contain fraudulent data.

– “The Stapel group had no protocols for, for example, the collection of data (including standards for questionnaires) or research reports. The PhD students in Mr Stapel’s group were not familiarized with fixed and clear standards.”P. 42

– Stapel personally taught his department’s scientific ethics course.

• A damning assessment of the discipline itself referring to “a failure to meet normal standards of methodology. [bringing] into the spotlight a research culture in which… sloppy science, alongside out-and-out fraud, was able to remain undetected for so long.” P. 5

• The field of psychology has come under particular scrutiny because many results in the scientific literature defy replication by other researchers. 

Discussion point:

• Are you aware of these fraud cases?• How does it affect you, and psychology?• Do things need to change?

4. Research data lossDecember 2012Laptop containing Trophic ecologist ‘s vast amount of experimental data from tracked fish (cost $50,000 CND).

The laptop was left by a graduate student in the backseat of a car parked outside a downtown restaurant .Someone broke in to the car and stole it.

“Unfortunately none of the data had been backed up yet. If we don’t get this laptop back, that data is lost forever.”

Data loss will happen to you

• …Theft of equipment• Dropping your laptop• Hard drive failures• Obsolescence/upgrades• Poorly described data

(metadata)• Overwriting data/versioning• Media degradation

(CDR’s, memory sticks, SSD’s)

Don’t just blame technology!

• People move on• Research trends (“follow the money

consequences”)

Discussion Point

• Has this happened to you?• What lessons have you learnt?

– E.g. have you changed where you’ve saved your data? Yes/No?

5. Data protection, rights & access

• Data Protection Act (1998) versus Freedom of Information Act (2000)

• Open Data versus confidentiality

What is personal data?• The Data Protection Act covers any data about a living and identifiable

individual.

• As a psychologist it may not always be obvious that you are collecting personal data. For example, if you run a traditional experiment and you store the names of participants then you need to comply with the requirements of the act.

• Whereas if you anonymise data you will not be storing personal data about a living individual, e.g. use ID numbers for participant data.

• In short there should be no way of identifying a unique individual from the data you hold or the way it is coded, e.g. don’t use DOBs as part of ID numbers.

• Different rules apply within clinical settings. For more information you are advised to contact the relevant person within your department, your institutions “data custodian”, or in NHS settings the Caldicott Guardian.

© University of Sheffield

Anonymisation of data…

Freedom of Information Act (2000)

• The Freedom of Information Act 2000 gives a general right of public access to all types of "recorded" information held by public authorities, sets out exemptions from that general right, and places a number of obligations on public authorities.

• The Act sets out to promote greater openness and accountability. It covers around 100,000 public authorities such as central government, local government, further and higher education, the police and the NHS.

What a FoI request means

• Requests for information made under the Act must be in writing (includes email).

• Requests must be dealt with promptly within a maximum time frame of 20 working days.

• In responding to a request for information, authorities will be obliged to provide information or say why they are rejecting the request.

• Contact Compliance Officer for UEL at foi@uel.ac.uk (see handout for examples)

Discussion Point:

To share or not to share?

What concerns do you have? Especially dealing with children.

6. What next?

• Weekly online learning modules you work through at your own pace

• Five modules– Research Data Explained– Organising Data– Documentation and Metadata– Storage and Security– Data Protection, rights and access

• Final meeting to review, share your needs and experiences

What is the TraD project?

• Embedding good RDM practice at UEL– Training doctoral students in Psychology &

workshop for staff 13th March 2013.– Training taught students in Geo-informatics– Generic workshop in Graduate School– Training course for liaison librarians

• Create, deliver and evaluate materials• Adopt into curricula and training

programmes

The project team can help you

• We can help when you write your Data Management Plans needed by funders

• Put plans in place to help existing projects• Help you manage/describe/share (if

appropriate) your data more effectively • Give advice and signposts with your own

data needs and questions

Thank you

Stephen Grace, s.grace@uel.ac.uk

Ext 7858

John Murtagh, j.p.murtagh@uel.ac.uk

Ext 6467

Find us at www.uel.ac.uk/trad

Blog at datamanagementuel.wordpress.com