4.3 Storing data

Interviewees contact details, recordings of interviews, transcripts and fieldnotes are all data. Researchers must store data in ways which protect the interviewee and are compliant with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). If your research is funded by an external organisation, they may have conditions about how data is stored which form part of their contract with you. Most of the conditions require you to store data in a way which is secure and ensures no-one else can access the data. These requirements apply to electronic data and to printed or hand-written data, such as notebooks. Usually, you will need to specify how you will store data as part of the ethical review of your project before you start. It can be a good idea to re-familiarise yourself with any such documentation before storing your data.

More information about GDPR can be found here [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .

Once data - such as interview transcripts - are anonymised they can be shared in the form of a report, or via a data repository. Sharing data via a data repository allows other researchers to carry out further analyses of the data and is good practice.